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…

Language practices represent significant barriers to engagement in higher education for many learners from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. In Australia, such students may be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners, students from rural and remote locations, learners who are the first in their family to access higher education,…

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…

English language learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing population in the US schools (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2011); these students are consistently outperformed by their White counterparts on the National Assessment of Educational Progress data (NCES, 2011). While traditional English as a second language (ESL) classes…

The Workshop on the Role of Language in School Learning: Implications for Closing the Achievement Gap was held to explore three questions: What is known about the conditions that affect language development? What are the effects of early language development on school achievement? What instructional approaches help students meet school demands for…

This readable book features K-12 teachers and teacher educators who report their experiences of culturally responsive literacy teaching in primarily high poverty, culturally nondominant communities. These extraordinary teachers show us what culturally responsive literacy teaching looks like in their classrooms and how it advances children's…

The present study focused on investigating (a) what authentic texts were used and (b) how they were used for instruction in three elementary schools, where learners' L1/D1 was a Caribbean Creole. Three findings emerged: First, teachers focused considerable attention on developing students' vocabularies and knowledge of English grammar. Second,…

Reading difficulties and disabilities present serious and potentially lifelong challenges. Children who do not read well are more likely to be retained a grade in school, drop out of high school, become a teen parent, or enter the juvenile justice system. Building on the extant research and seminal studies, including the National Reading Panel and…

This project was initiated in response to the science and mathematics language needs of Sea Island students who speak African-American dialects. Research has indicated that there appears to be a relationship between dialect diversity and academic success. In response, the program's goals were to identify students who exhibited dialect/language…

Although the middle class child may come to school with a fairly large and useful vocabulary, teachers must be concerned with the extension of that vocabulary beyond its present limits. While the language of the middle class child is probably not an important concern in the choice of reading methods or the selection of word lists, it does have…

Although intended for use in English methods courses, this book is also intended as a resource and reference work for inservice English teachers. It contains chapters on the following topics: curriculum patterns, year plans, and unit plans; planning and presenting the English lesson; the purposes of teaching literature; the structure of…

The purpose of this book is to deal with pressing problems encountered by secondary teachers in teaching reading, through synthesizing pertinent research and suggesting classroom applications. Its 16 chapters deal with the following topics: the teen-aged nonreader; complicating factors in the teaching of reading; a school-wide attack on reading…

In this column, the author relates her experience as a teacher in a K-12 school in Point Hope, Alaska, where most of the students spoke "village English," a form of nonstandard English mixed with the village's native language of Inupiaq. She relates how the students' reading test scores, which had been below the 25th percentile, were…

The twenty-eight papers that make up the second part of the proceedings of the twenty-eighth annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages cover a wide range of topics relating to foreign language teaching and linguistic theory: German culture and civilization; sexism in language; bilingual education; bilingualism and…