This essay explores the teaching and learning of Black British literature in UK secondary schools with reference to texts that now appear on GCSE English Literature specifications. It seeks to reveal some of the issues that may arise when teaching texts that deal with race and racism while emphasising the role of racial literacy in facilitating…

There is tremendous variation in the use of American English by major geographic regions, as well as within these regions or cities, and by cultural background. The variety of English spoken by many African American people in the United States is called African American English (AAE). AAE affects early literacy skills in ways that may require…

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…

Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, African American Language (AAL) remains stigmatized throughout the United States education system. There have been proposals to counteract this through curricula and/or ideological interventions targeted at teachers that seek to validate AAL while maintaining Dominant American English (DAE) as an…

Scholarly writing is traditionally written and reviewed with a positivist mindset, based on ideas of universal truths that typically remove subjectivisms, cultural experiences, and marginalized voices from the writing process. Writing in this manner fails to recognize how the societal and internalized ideas of white dominance can negatively…

The ability to encode (spell) is an integral writing skill needed to communicate effectively. The ability to spell, also, enhances decoding as spelling and decoding are reciprocal skills that rely on knowledge of the same subskills. Spelling can also be particularly difficult for students with literacy and phonological-processing difficulties such…

Despite a wealth of scholarship documenting its linguistic complexity, students in the United States are rarely encouraged to speak or write in African American Language (AAL) in their primary classrooms. The authors documented how one teacher and his highly diverse second-grade class examined, explored, and experimented with AAL in an…

The authors reviewed the literature regarding linguistic variations seen in American Sign Language. These variations are influenced by region and culture. Features of spoken languages have also influenced sign languages as they intersected, e.g., Black ASL has been influenced by African American English. A literature review was conducted to…

This article argues that writing teachers should allow, and even encourage, students to code-mesh in community college classrooms. By looking at and analyzing code-meshed writing produced by three students in an English 101 class, the author argues that code-meshing provides students with both a craft-wise approach to writing and a way to address…

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

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…

In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the…

Purpose: This paper aims to outline the misguided underpinnings of the "word gap" concept promoted by Hart and Risley (1995). This concept posits that a "30 million word gap" between children of poverty and those from affluent households accounts for widespread academic disparities. Based on this premise, there has been a…

The 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication's (CCCC) resolution declaring "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL) defends the rights of students and all other writers to use different varieties of English (see Committee on CCCC Language Statement, 1974). In addition, the 1988 CCCC adoption of the National…

This experiment measured teachers' attitudes towards African American English and Academic English. Participants were graduate students of Education at a college in New York City. They completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that assessed their explicit attitudes towards the two varieties, as well as a Psycholinguistic Experiment that was…