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This essay begins with the question, "What can educators do to minimize the risks inherent to interracial dialogue?" Though no such meaningful conversation ever will be without risk, this article offers two specific strategies that have helped foster open classroom climates: adding without contradiction and granting freedom for conclusions. Both of these strategies intervene on several dysfunctional habits U.S. participants enact in conversations about race and, thus, help enrich the ameliorative capacity of interracial dialogue.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine attitudes towards African-American vernacular English (AAVE) in a setting outside of the USA. Because foreign attitudes toward AAVE can serve as an indirect assessment of a society's racial prejudice, we decided to explore these attitudes in Japan: a country with an intriguing mix of ties that are both close (i.e. politically and economically) and distant (i.e. culturally) vis-a-vis the USA. Considering the ostensible similarities in racial beliefs widely held in both countries, we hypothesised that evaluations of AAVE in Japan would be comparable to those in the USA. We found that the evaluations expressed by a sample of Japanese college students were virtually indistinguishable from the overall pattern of AAVE evaluations made by US Americans and recommend additional research in order to better understand the nature of contemporary Japanese attitudes towards different varieties of English. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

Efforts aimed at promoting multiculturalism in the classroom are often pedestrian and ineffectual. When instructors do succeed at facilitating honest discourse, they frequently fail to anticipate the great deal of pain, frustration and anger that is invoked. Rather than sustain a false sense of community, we argue that a dialogic, multicultural community can only be achieved by fostering breach of mainstream norms. Using cultural anthropologist Victor Turner's notion of social drama as a theoretical framework, we document the intense conflict that erupted in our classroom when students were pressed to engage one another regarding issues of race. In order to both acknowledge and make public our students' emotional responses to the dialogue, we implemented a 'recursive loop', a pedagogical strategy designed to provide immediate feedback and enable students to come to a richer understanding of how their experiences of race are inextricably linked. By analyzing the students' discourse, we demonstrate how these voices do not occur in a vacuum; to the contrary, they are articulated in response to one another and to grand narratives used to make years of oppression appear invisible. Ultimately, we contend that White Identity Transformation is necessary for a multicultural community and that such transformation is facilitated, ironically enough, by conflict.

Examines Anglo- and Asian-American attitudes toward Mandarin Chinese-accented English. Studies involving 135 undergraduates reveal no negative attitudes toward a Chinese-accented speaker during a job interview, but do find negative attitudes within the college classroom. Results show a need to better understand the role of context in shaping attitudes toward language. (GR)