Via an account of the genesis, development, and enactment of a seminar in translingual writing, this paper represents an attempt to indicate the extensive amount and interdisciplinary nature of the knowledge that one needs to be familiar with in order to develop a rich and nuanced understanding of the phenomenon as well as to provide a resource…

Examines how a group of continental Francophone African youth at a French high school in Ottawa, Canada "become Black" as they enter a world that already constructs them as Black. These students learn Black English, which they access in hip-hop culture and linguistic styles. Discusses the impact of becoming Black on…

When children (particularly African Americans) have a different orthography, phonemic system, and deep structure from Standard American English (SAE) speakers, they may have difficulty grasping the correct SAE phonemes represented by the symbols and reading in general. Language acquisition is natural learning centered around the interaction of…

In a study demonstrating that Black English was target for Hispanic boys acquiring English as second language, it was shown that extensive peer contact with Blacks was necessary but not sufficient for acquisition of two features of Black English (negative concord and distributive "be") and that choice of Blacks as reference played no role in…

This issue has four articles. Maria del Pilar Garcia Mayo and Teresa Pica in "Is the EFL Environment a Language Learning Environment?" address the question of whether the English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom is an environment that promotes input, feedback, and the production of output that is necessary for successful second…