This essay asserts the importance for English/Language Arts educators to become conversant with the features of Black Language and the cultural and historical foundations of this speech genre as a rule-bound, grammatically consistent pattern of speech. These features go beyond grammar to include such conventions as a reliance on storytelling as a…

Collins et al. 2008 offers a principles-and-parameters-based analysis of an AAVE construction first described in Spears 1998, in which nominal phrases such as "John's ass" appear to have exactly the same denotation, and behavior with respect to familiar conditions on anaphora, as the possessor ["John," and similarly for pronominal possessors.…

This document shares Dr. Walt Wolfram's views on African-American Dialect. He states that the most elementary principle is that all language is patterned and rule-governed, and one can apply that principle to African-American English, Appalachian English, and to every other dialect that is examined.

This essay examines a Brooklyn College-based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC's 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday…

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students' vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may,…