In this article Renata Love Jones and Patrick Proctor introduce the notion of pursuing language to engage in critical dialogue about the nature and focus of language and literacy education in multilingual and multicultural contexts. A persistent threat in language and literacy education is standardization that constrains how language and literacy…

The study and characterization of the literary uses of non-standard American English writing systems was once a topic of research central to the study of American literature. "Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930" argues that the emergence of new computational tools and theoretical insights…

The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern…

Syntactic priming studies in second language (L2) have contributed to understanding how L2 speakers' syntactic knowledge is represented and processed. However, little is known about social influences on L2 speakers' syntactic processing and learning. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers' syntactic priming is influenced by social…

Indigenous children living in the more remote areas of Australia where Indigenous languages continue to be spoken often come to school with only minimal knowledge of English, but they may speak two or more local languages. Others come to school speaking either a creole, or Aboriginal English, non-standard varieties which may sound similar to…

Scholars such as Diane Kelly-Riley and Patricia Bizzell have argued that the student writing feature most likely to place a student into a basic writing course is the presence of dialect other than standard academic English. This essay examines how assessment practices can foster students' diverse languages rather than inhibit them. I conducted a…

Employing an explanatory design, this study set out to investigate the morphosyntacticstructures of the SMS language of Communication English I students, and the types of SMSlanguage features used in their written work at a university of technology in South Africa. Thestudy randomly sampled 90 undergraduate students (M = 40; F = 50) enrolled for a…

In discussions of cross-linguistic influence (also known as language transfer), the focus is usually on the influence of a particular structure in a particular instance of language contact, for instance, the negative transfer of serial verbs by Vietnamese learners of English: "She has managed to rise the kite fly over the tallest…

This dissertation examines the acquisition of object clitic placement in Standard Italian by heritage speakers (HSs) of non-standard Italian dialects. It compares two different groups of Standard Italian learners--Northern Italian dialect HSs and Southern Italian dialect HSs--whose heritage dialects contrast with each other in clitic word order.…

Aboriginal English has been documented in widely separated parts of Australia and, despite some stylistic and regional variation, is remarkably consistent across the continent, and provides a vehicle for the common expression of Aboriginal identity. There is, however, some indeterminacy in the way in which the term is used in much academic and…

Updated versions of "Dialects ("The Florida FL Reporter, Winter 1966-1967). Appears in "The Florida FL Reporter special anthology issue "Linguistic-Cultural Differences and American Education. (FWB)

Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, in the section on language of his book "The Myth of the Negro Past" (1941), gives one of the first scientific orientations to the study of black speech in the United States. His basic contribution was to establish the following main points: (1) that the black people in the New World came from regions…

Four realizations of the copula occur in English, two in both Anglo and Black English and two in Black English and in some varieties of Anglo English but not in standard English. This paper describes the use of the copula in English and identifies the phonological, syntactic, and semantic factors which are believed to condition its realization in…

An idealized model of mutual second dialect acquisition in a bidialectal speech community is presented, placed in historical context, and used to illustrate the inherent social nature of hypercorrection and hypocorrection. The controversy surrounding hypercorrection for Black English is reviewed, and hypocorrection is shown to reinforce…