For educators committed to promoting social equity, the question of how to address dialect hegemony is increasingly important. While linguists have long accepted the concept of dialect equality, educators have struggled with the issue, sparking a history of controversy and debate underscoring larger social issues of diversity and equity. For…

Using the tenets of translanguaging and with a focus on Arabic as a diglossic language, we examine the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between/among Standard Arabic, Arabic dialects, and English in content-based instruction in an advanced Arabic literature course. Using conversation analysis, we show how translingual…

Purpose: Ideologies are like rocks onto which individuals and institutions anchor their thoughts about what it means to be an "ideal language user" and what "standardized languaging" is. These deeply ingrained beliefs, influenced by colonial legacies and sociopolitical contexts, invisibly enforce a hierarchical order between…

Different languages, dialects, accents, or other forms of language (a.k.a. codes or varieties of language) are used in various healthcare facilities around the world. However, only a limited number of studies have explored the switching of varieties in healthcare environments. Hospitals in Saudi Arabia are multilingual and multicultural…

Drawing on translanguaging and raciolinguistics frameworks in an ethnographic case study, this article contextualizes how young Black American children engage in rich literacy practices to validate their cultural and linguistic identities in an elementary, two-way immersion bilingual program. Findings demonstrated that despite teachers' perceived…

This article highlights research collected during a year-long critical participatory ethnographic study at a primary school in Trinidad and Tobago. The study presents the experiences of two teacher collaborators who engage in the processes of problem identification, design and implementation of a language-friendly plan, reflective practice and…

South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a…

Classrooms act as linguistic sieves when they continue to accept only dominant forms of English as the "correct" and "appropriate" language choice for all students. Students who speak other languages, such as African American Language or Spanish, are often encouraged to use those languages on the playground or at home but not…

This article examines the language and cognitive skills of bidialectal and bilingual children, focusing on African American English bidialectal speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers. It contributes to the discussion by considering two themes in the extant literature: (1) linguistic and cognitive strengths can be found in speaking two…

Looking at the frequently used English words on billboard ads in Jakarta main streets, one may have a presumptive thought that English will dominate Indonesian language. The assumption, though, has led to the analysis of the role of both languages on billboard ads and the possibility of English control over Indonesian. The study presented…

Purpose: The purpose of this longitudinal study was twofold: to examine shifting from African American English (AAE) to mainstream American English (MAE) across the early elementary grades, when students are first exposed to formal instruction in reading; and to examine how metalinguistic and cognitive variables influenced the students' dialectal…

In our increasingly diverse schools, students bring diverse ways of speaking to the classroom. In turn, as features from students' home language varieties transfer into their readings of texts, teachers' assessment and intervention plans may be directly affected. If teachers conflate dialect influence with reading error in Standard English, they…

In this article, we focus on instructional support for 91 students who speak African American Vernacular English and who are at high risk for not passing the required state exams. We profile the instruction that was provided and the results from that instruction, providing examples of how students' language was scaffolded such that they could code…

Being up front with students about Standard English as "the language of power" allows them to learn valuable lessons about Standard and non-Standard English dialects. In this article, the author describes an eighth-grade language unit that helps students understand the value of dialects and standardized English. The author concludes that the…

Students who grow up speaking regional dialects benefit from learning code switching (CS) strategies to allow bidialectal communication across their social worlds. This rationale proposes that students' home language of Appalachian English is acceptable at home and should be preserved; however, another set of language patterns, those of Standard…