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Ideologies of language and race are deeply connected in the United States. Language practices associated with racially marginalized communities, such as African American Language (AAL) or Spanglish, are often heavily stigmatized. Such stigma is not grounded in empirical research on language, but rather in "raciolinguistic ideologies" that reproduce white supremacy and oppression in teacher education and in US classrooms—including science classrooms. Science education need not be this way, however. Translanguaging pedagogies can create space for students to use any and all types of languaging practices to engage in scientific sensemaking. Implementing translanguaging pedagogies to support scientific sensemaking will require science teachers to develop inclusive ideologies of language—not only the knowledge that multiple varieties of language are valid tools for sensemaking, but also the inclination and ability to formatively assess student thinking even when that thinking is not couched in canonical "science language." In the present manuscript, we explore the relationships among teachers' language ideologies, their racial ideologies, their knowledge of language as an epistemic tool for teaching science, their self‐reported assessment practices, and their actual responses to several different samples of student science writing—including a writing sample that includes an oft‐stigmatized feature of African American Language. We show that teachers with more language‐inclusive ideologies—that is, those who take a translanguaging stance, and thus value the use of AAL in classrooms—appear to be better at formatively assessing and responding to student science writing compared to teachers with more language‐exclusive ideologies. We also show that seemingly race‐neutral ideologies of language are in fact strongly associated with oppressive ideologies of race, and that these language ideologies predict teachers' science formative assessment practices independently of existing measures of pedagogical knowledge. We discuss implications for science teaching, teacher education, and science education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origins of the variable - s -marking patterns of present-tense verbs in earlier African American English (AAE) have been widely argued, with one of the most common arguments stating that the pattern is indicative of the Northern Subjects Rule (NSR), a variable - s -marking rule common in the northern British Isles. I explored verbal - s in the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives to understand what patterns of - s -marking existed in earlier AAE and how these patterns differed across regions. Statistical analysis suggested no NSR influence in AAE as a whole or within any of the regions, but - s -marking still significantly differed between and within regions. I discuss other possible causes of this variation, including influence from other concord patterns, aspectual marking, and phonotactics, but highlight the difficulty of proposing concrete hypotheses due to change over time and a dearth of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand‐up special, Baby Cobra, through a genre‐specific lens to investigate how stand‐up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms indexically associated with Blackness to perform racialized and gendered figures of personhood, including the white "Karen," "sassy Black woman," and "Asian grandmother." This performance allows Wong to challenge hegemonic whiteness and dominant racializations of Asian women but relies on signs potentially interpreted as reproducing anti‐Black ideologies. We situate Wong as an individual performer, "Asian American" as an ethnoracial category vis‐à‐vis Blackness, and the linguistic practices of Asian and Black American communities within racial capitalist histories that have shaped contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies. Rather than approach language varieties and racialized groups as necessarily distinct, we treat them as relational—as necessarily intimately and historically connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of African American Language (AAL) and *Standardized American English (*SAE) in Black/African American same-race teacher-student relationships. The teachers in this study (1) used AAL as a valuable tool for building rapport and trust with their students; (2) were aware of their positions as linguistic role models; and (3) encouraged AAL-speaking students to use *SAE due to concerns about racial and linguistic profiling. Results suggest that because AAL-speaking African American teachers understand the United States to be a racially stratified society, they encourage their students to use *SAE with intentions of helping students advance socially and economically. This study illuminates why African American teachers use their shared language proficiency with their same-race students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: African American Language (AAL) refers to a rich, widely used, and extensively researched language variety. Despite its importance, AAL remains widely stigmatized in the United States due to anti-Black linguistic racism. Many colleges offer courses with AAL content, and these courses have the potential to help disrupt anti-Black linguistic racism by promoting understanding and respect for this language. Purpose: Simply increasing students' knowledge about AAL is unlikely to disrupt anti-Black linguistic racism. College instructors must also attend to a wide range of challenges involved in teaching this content. Instructors' knowledge of such challenges, as well as strategies for addressing them, constitutes a form of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This study contributes to the emerging scholarship on PCK for teaching and learning about AAL. Research Design: In this qualitative study, we analyze open-ended survey data from college instructors to identify challenges faced when teaching AAL content. We also add depth and nuance to discussion of these challenges by analyzing qualitative interview data and qualitative survey responses from college students enrolled in courses with AAL content. Finally, we outline pedagogical recommendations that could potentially address these challenges. Conclusions: We identify three major categories of pedagogical challenges that commonly arise when teaching AAL content: protecting Black or AAL-using students from harm; managing other students' knowledge, ideologies, and/or resistance; and addressing instructor positionality. We present six research-based recommendations to help instructors address these challenges, and identify key directions for future research on the teaching and learning of AAL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While culturally responsive teaching is widely acknowledged as essential to student success, a lack of consistency in what it is called, what it looks like, and how to enact it can present a challenge for educators. Further, the trend toward political polarization has spread fear and misunderstanding of critical race theory and is now taking aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in education and society, including culturally responsive teaching. Thus, it behooves scholars and educators to assert unequivocally that culturally responsive teaching is not an approach that silences or condemns any group of students' cultural knowledge, beliefs, or perspectives, be they mainstream or underrepresented. Rather, one essential component across multiple nuanced definitions of culturally responsive teaching is a focus on identifying and leveraging all students' cultural strengths in service of learning. One well-established cultural asset of many African American students, who consistently experience inequitable outcomes in U.S. schools, is their language. As African American Language (AAL) has been identified as the most widely studied language variety in the world, the body of scholarship identifying and exploring its strengths is rich and robust. Using the framework of Foster et al.'s Heuristic for Thinking about Culturally Responsive Teaching (HiTCRiT), this review explores scholarship on the use of AAL in three spheres—everyday discourse, literature and expository texts, and popular media—to illustrate both the challenges and potential of enacting asset-focused pedagogies by leveraging a broad and diverse variety of texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four teacher educators describe their work to establish Afrocentric foundations through integrating literacy and linguistic pluralism courses. We build on realities that teachers and children "do not learn, systematically and deeply, about Black genius and worth" (Baines, Tisdale, & Long, 2018, p. 20) in schools or universities nor do they learn a critical consciousness, impacting their abilities to dismantle Eurocratic systems. We share challenges and outcomes (including university and PreK-3 teaching examples) in building liberatory praxis focused on the African cradle of civilization, anti-colonialism, African/African American erasure in schooling today, African and Diaspora languages, and the multilingualism of AAL speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While culturally responsive teaching is widely acknowledged as essential to student success, a lack of consistency in what it is called, what it looks like, and how to enact it can present a challenge for educators. Further, the trend toward political polarization has spread fear and misunderstanding of critical race theory and is now taking aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in education and society, including culturally responsive teaching. Thus, it behooves scholars and educators to assert unequivocally that culturally responsive teaching is not an approach that silences or condemns any group of students’ cultural knowledge, beliefs, or perspectives, be they mainstream or underrepresented. Rather, one essential component across multiple nuanced definitions of culturally responsive teaching is a focus on identifying and leveraging all students’ cultural strengths in service of learning. One well-established cultural asset of many African American students, who consistently experience inequitable outcomes in U.S. schools, is their language. As African American Language (AAL) has been identified as the most widely studied language variety in the world, the body of scholarship identifying and exploring its strengths is rich and robust. Using the framework of Foster et al.’s Heuristic for Thinking about Culturally Responsive Teaching (HiTCRiT), this review explores scholarship on the use of AAL in three spheres—everyday discourse, literature and expository texts, and popular media—to illustrate both the challenges and potential of enacting asset-focused pedagogies by leveraging a broad and diverse variety of texts.

Drawing on recent decades, literature in college writing that theorizes the importance of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) curricula for African American Language (AAL)-speaking students, this article offers empirical evidence on the design and implementation of a college writing curriculum centered on CLA and its influence on AAL–speaking students' language ideologies with respect to both speech and writing. Qualitative analyses of students' pre- and-post-Questionnaires and the researcher's field notes demonstrate that the curriculum helped students view AAL as an independent, natural, and legitimate language and view themselves as critically conscious thinkers and writers—more likely and willing to develop their academic writing skills and the strategies that support employing their native language in writing—for example, code-meshing strategies. This study offers important implications for college writing instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant privilege that is ascribed to Standard American English within American classrooms presents socio-cultural challenges for many Black students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This study will examine the ways in which race, language, and power intersect in the classroom to shape Black students' academic performance and self-concept. Grounded in critical race theory, this study includes qualitative interviews with Black students at two urban high schools in south Los Angeles. A thematic analysis of these interviews will reveal how the stigmatization of AAVE in urban schools compels Black students to adopt dominant ideologies and practices that isolate them from their cultural subjectivities. Findings from this study call educators to develop a culturally relevant pedagogy that empowers Black students to utilize and access their socio-cultural capital in and out of the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on qualitative research that examines the biliteracy practices of Black Language (BL) speakers in an elementary, two-way immersion (TWI), dual-language bilingual program, using Raciolinguistics as a theoretical lens. Specific questions that guided the study addressed the features of communicative contexts where BL was utilized and the linguistic features of BL that were shared in these multilingual spaces from the students. Findings demonstrated that BL speakers exercised student agency often as they utilized BL in a variety of roles and contexts despite restrictive language policies. Implications for educators working with BL speakers in TWI programs are shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To counter anti-Black racism in the current post-civil rights movement era and to serve the needs of African American students whose cultural experiences have been historically marginalized in U.S. education (Mustaffa, 2017), schools and school systems should strive to provide culturally responsive and sustaining curricula (Paris & Alim, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014). However, when attempts have been made to practice cultural responsivity in English language arts and music education, the result has been an alarming and emotionally charged public backlash (Smitherman, 2006). This article explains this backlash and the resistance to Black sound culture in the classroom by exploring the colonial gaze (Kaplan, 1997) on the Black auditory body. I call this phenomenon "fishbowl colonialism," which describes how Black American music and language are exploited for entertainment but historically have not been considered worthy of serious study or inclusion in formal education. My aim in this essay is to historicize the stigmatization and subalternity of Black sound culture (Keyes, 2003) and to analyze how this stigma hinders efforts to provide culturally responsive education for African American students. If those who shape educational policy and curricula understand how the fishbowl colonialism of Black sound culture influences education policies, African American language (AAL) and music can be reframed in the classroom as a culturally responsive practice that centers on the culture of Black students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study considers the dynamic trajectory of fronting of the back vowels boot and boat for 27 speakers in a unique, longstanding context of a substantive, triethnic contact situation involving American Indians, European Americans, and African Americans over three disparate generations in Robeson County, North Carolina. The results indicate that the earlier status of Lumbee English fronting united them with the African American vowel system, particularly for the boot vowel, but that more recent generations have shifted toward alignment with European American speakers. Given that the biracial Southeastern United States historically identified Lumbee Indians as "free persons of color" and the persistent skepticism about the Lumbee Indians as merely a mixed group of European Americans and African Americans, the movement away from the African American pattern toward the European American pattern was interpreted as a case of oppositional identity in which Lumbee Indians disassociate themselves from African American vowel norms in subtle but socially meaningful ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how men with one Black parent and one white parent variably construct their racial identities through both linguistic practice and explicit testimonials, with a specific focus on how this construction is realized in narratives about law enforcement. The data consist of interviews with five young men, aged 18-32, in Washington, D.C., and the analysis compares use of intonational phenomena associated with African American Language (AAL) in response to questions about aspects of their racial identities. Declarative intonational phrases from responses to questions were MAE-ToBi annotated and analyzed for use of intonational features subject to racialized stylistic variation, including use of L+H* versus H*, focus marking, and peak delay interval length. Results of multiple regression models indicate speakers avoid intonational features associated with AAL in police narratives, especially L+H* pitch accents with broad focus marking and longer peak delay intervals. These findings illuminate an important aspect of the relationship between linguistic performance and identity: both racial and linguistic identities are subject to topic and audience/referee-conditioned variation and individuals can use specific intonational variables to align themselves within specific audience and topic-influenced constraints. In the context of police narratives, avoidance of salient features of AAL intonation can serve as linguistic respectability politics; these speakers have motivation to employ linguistic behavior that distances them from the most societally and physically precarious implications of their identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because racism is permanently woven into the fabric of American society, the fight for Black equality and liberation is a constant struggle of resistance. Traditionally, a strong method of resistance utilized by oppressed people has been the use of language. Language is a form of symbolic power, a political force utilized to empower those who make use of it. Language is far more than just use of words, however; it is the way meaning is provided to communication. Using data collected from an ethnographic study of school board meetings, this paper will discuss how the educational community of Flint, Michigan, uses language to resist current socioeconomic and sociopolitical oppressions, specifically focusing on their resistance to the Flint water crisis. The findings of this research show that Flint educational members use features of African American Language to resist social, political, economic, and educational oppressions and injustices. Especially evident is their use of cultural values, community consciousness, and field dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American Language (AAL) is one of the most researched varieties of American English, yet key aspects of its development and spread remain under‐theorized. For example, regional and social variation in the speech of African Americans was initially understudied in AAL as scholars sought to demonstrate the overall systematicity of the variety, often at the expense of examining variation across and within communities. More recently, scholars have begun to address this gap by examining different sources of variation in AAL phonology. For instance, the African American Vowel System (AAVS), also called the African American Vowel Shift, describes a pattern identified within AAL, including the raising of the front lax vowels and the nonfronting of the high‐ and mid‐back vowels. Aspects of the AAVS have been found in geographically widespread varieties of AAL, suggesting that shared patterns of population movement resulting from the Great Migration and subsequent social experiences may have led to the development of this system. Other more regionally limited sound patterns suggest the role of more localized processes of variation and change. We focus on three sources of variation that have contributed to the spread and realizations of the sound system in modern AAL: migration, segregation, and place and identity. Evidence from sociophonetic analyses across these three factors provides a foundation to more thoroughly document the ways in which AAL varieties developed, spread, and vary, while allowing for a more nuanced assessment of racialization and its implications for individual differences. This article is categorized under:Linguistics > Linguistic TheoryPsychology > Language [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While sociolinguists defined the regional sound changes around the linguistic behavior of White speakers, recent work has shown that racialized speakers employ local sound changes in socially meaningful ways. Advocating for an approach which places race and races place, this work views racialized speakers as authentic locals, situating their linguistic behavior in the context of their communities. Using the theoretic model of the persona, I examine how race and place are co‐constituted in Rochester, NY. Specifically, this paper examines how BAT lowering and retraction among younger speakers is led by the Mobile Black Professional, an emergent persona defined by their desire to relocate for work in a post‐industrial economy. This investigation prompts the field to reconsider the a priori exclusion of 'ethnic' speakers from studies of local sound change advancement and reversal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines how listeners make gradient and variable ethnolinguistic judgments in an experimental context where the speaker’s identity is well-known. It features an open-guise experiment (Soukup, 2013) that assessed whether sociolinguistic judgments are subject to incrementality, with judgments increasing in magnitude as variable stimuli demonstrate more extreme differences. In particular, this task tested whether judgments of President Barack Obama as sounding ‘more’ or ‘less’ black (e.g., Alim & Smitherman, 2012) are sensitive to differences in intonation. Half of critical stimuli featured an L+H* pitch accent, which occurs more frequently in African American Language than in Mainstream U.S. English (Holliday, 2016). Four stimuli apiece were created from these phrases by making each pitch accent more extreme by semitone-based F0 steps. Seventy-nine listeners rated these stimuli via the question, “How black does Obama sound here?” Mixed-effects modeling indicated that listeners rated more phonetically extreme L+H* stimuli as sounding blacker, regardless of listener identity. A post-hoc analysis found that listeners attended to different voice quality features in L+H* stimuli. We discuss implications for research in intonation, ethnic identification, incrementality, language attitudes, and sociolinguistic awareness.

This article examines the partnership between a teacher and teacher educator disrupting a colonized early childhood curriculum that fosters a dominance of whiteness by replacing it with the beauty and brilliance of Blackness. We explore the following research question: "What are the affordances of teaching from an Afrocentric stance in a first-grade classroom?" We employ Afrocentrism, which includes African cultural principles as the paradigm, and our theoretical lenses are Critical Race Theory and Black Critical Theory. Our Sankofa methodology revealed that African Diaspora literacies fostered (a) positive racial and gender identities, (b) community, and (c) positive linguistic identities in the work to help children to love themselves, their histories, and their peoples. We close with implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how 9- to 13-year old African American students in a Washington, D.C. after-school program use an African American discourse practice called marking to voice adults performing acts of discipline. Using audio-recorded data collected during nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how students used marking to resemiotize the prestige value of African American Language (AAL) relative to so-called "standard" American English, which is imagined in relation to whiteness as an objectively correct set of linguistic practices. As part of an intersectional raciolinguistic perspective, this study foregrounds how students recruit gender stereotypes to challenge hegemonic ideas about racial and linguistic difference. It also attends to the contradictory nature of everyday acts of resistance: while students transformed hegemonic raciolinguistic ideologies of "articulate" and "appropriate" language in the after school space, they relied on racial and gender stereotypes in order to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is in three parts. I begin with an introduction to the concept of African American Language (AAL), discussing its position in American society in relation to the hegemony of Standardized American English. I then explore the use of AAL in Illumination Entertainment’s The Secret Life of Pets (2016). The characters’ code-switching to AAL in the film is problematized, and I argue that AAL is utilized to mark animated characters as both deviant and belonging to a lower socio-economic class. Furthermore, I assert that AAL is used to introduce issues of social inequality, issues that by the end of the film appear unimportant by a central character’s realization that his claims of social inequality are unsubstantiated. Thus, the film attempts to silence both AAL and the pleas for equality expressed through Black Language. Finally, this paper highlights the ways that The Secret Life of Pets works to shape viewers’, students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards African American citizens and the legitimacy of AAL.

This study examines use of rising, falling, and level boundary tones across question types in the Corpus of Regional African American Language. Data were taken from interviews with 87 speakers in Washington, D.C.: 53 in the DCA component, conducted in 1968-69, and 34 in the DCB component, conducted in 2015-17. Results of multiple mixed-effects regression models indicate substantial variation within speakers in the use of question tones, as well as possible change over time. In general, speakers in the DCA component demonstrate more variation in the use of falling, level, and rising tones across three question types (i.e., yes-no, discourse, and open-ended [wh-] questions) than speakers in the DCB component. In DCB, speakers appear to use mostly rising and falling tones across the three question types, with few instances of level tones, suggesting a possible change over time and potential convergence toward Mainstream U.S. English (MUSE) norms in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Additionally, data from both DCA and DCB showed intracomponent variation not necessarily conditioned by demographic factors, also supporting previous hypotheses that AAL may have a system with a freer expression of question boundaries than that of MUSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines variability in the social factors and internal linguistic constraints on (ING) in African American Language (AAL) based on a comparison of the two Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) components from Washington, D.C., CORAAL:DCA (recorded 1968-69) and CORAAL:DCB (recorded 2015-17). It also compares DCA with an early study of (ING) in Detroit in 1968. The analysis indicates important differences in how social factors correlate with (ING) over both space and time, as socioeconomic status and gender show differential intersections that distinguish the earlier AAL sample from Washington, D.C., from a comparable AAL sample from Detroit, as well as the D.C. sample a halfcentury later. Internal constraints from the current CORAAL study tend to align with those indicted in other studies, but some minor constraint effects indicate structural diversity. The comparative results point to a more nuanced understanding of the features that characterize AAL over time and place as well as a more informed perspective on how (ING) functions as a general sociolinguistic variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a quantitative approach to exploring topic-based morphosyntactic variation in African American Language (AAL). Using data from 45 speakers from the DCA component of the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL), stratified for age, gender, and socioeconomic status, this study uses a dialect density measure to compare the rate of AAL morphosyntactic feature use across the topics introduced in these classic sociolinguistic interviews. Chi-square testing and multiple linear regression of the rates of features per utterance reveals significant effect of topic on morphosyntactic feature use rate overall and reveals additional effects of gender, age, and socioeconomic status within topics. The results indicate that topic-based shifting does occur and suggests that certain types of topics are more likely to expose a given individual's range of stylistic variation. Ultimately, it provides evidence for the validity of taking a style-driven approach to data collected using classic sociolinguistic methods pioneered during the first wave of language variation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the substantive body of research on African American Language (AAL), designating it a meaningful, rule-governed language system and the first language of many African Americans, schools in the US have systematically failed to integrate a language policy related to African American English learners (AAELs). In this article, we employ a critical discourse and policy analysis to examine two major policies related to AAL and AAELs - the Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District, a federal district case in Michigan known as the Ann Arbor Decision, and the Ebonics Resolution adopted by the Oakland California Board of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Our analysis reveals three themes across these texts - they affirm AAL as a ‘home and community language’ in its own right, mandate teachers to take ‘appropriate action’ in teaching AAL speakers, and dispel notions that AAL stems from cultural, social, and economic deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American South has undergone unprecedented change over the last half century, including the dynamics of ethnic group configuration and ethnolinguistic variation. This article considers symbolic dimensions of language and ethnicity representing three different types of ethnic group situations in the South. Two of the situations, involving Native American Indians and African Americans, represent long-standing ethnic contact situations that are being reconfigured over time and place in the American South; the third situation involves an emerging ethnolinguistic variety related to the more recent influx of large numbers of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Demographic, economic, social, and cultural-ideological variables come into play in each case, but the relative contribution of these factors varies for different situations. It is further essential to recognize the intersection of sociohistorical and sociopsychological factors with the dynamics of linguistic structures and properties that has led to different outcomes in the ethnolinguistic configuration of various groups. Though the moniker "New South" may be applicable to the contemporary configuration of language and ethnicity compared with the past, we demonstrate how each situation is also unique and complex in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending previous research (Cunningham, 2014), which investigated social network site (SNS) comments composed in digital African American Language (DAAL), this research analyzes text messages composed among three, male DAAL interlocutors. This study draws from grounded theory, content analysis, digital language (DL) research, and linguistics scholarship on African American Language (AAL) in order to examine the patterns and frequencies of AAL and DL features found among 380 text messages. Comparing the text message results to Cunningham (2014)’s SNS findings, this study suggests significant ways that DAAL follows predictable, identifiable, and similar linguistic and paralinguistic patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• AAL content is taught in Linguistics, Education, English, and other disciplines. • Instructors find support from outside their institutions more often than from inside. • Instructors who use AAL themselves are more likely to encounter student resistance. • Instructors vary widely in their knowledge of African American Language and Culture. • These findings can guide specific policies and practices to support AAL instruction. College courses are an important forum for combating the stigmatization of African American Language (AAL). However, there is no comprehensive data regarding where, how, and by whom AAL content is taught. Understanding the landscape of college teaching about AAL could help identify challenges faced by instructors who teach this content, as well as policies or practices that could help support these instructors. We surveyed college instructors (N = 149) in multiple disciplines (primarily Linguistics, Education, English, and Communication Sciences) who teach courses with AAL content. We found patterns in the sources of support and levels of resistance instructors reported. Instructors also expressed varied levels of knowledge and confidence related to teaching about African American Language and Culture. Many of these patterns were correlated with instructors' racialized identities and language backgrounds. We discuss implications for professional organizations, university department leaders, and instructors who teach AAL content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through this piece, we draw upon critical race theory and Collins’s Afrocentric feminist epistemology to highlight the importance of storytelling as a knowledge validation system in Black women’s language. We illuminate and analyze a dialogic performance of two Black female literacy scholars in a coffee house “sipping tea,” sharing stories about their joint triumphs and challenges with teaching through equity-based pedagogies. The article takes its political and poetical inspiration from this dialogic performance placed in the center of the article. The dialogue is meant to enliven and represent the Afrocentric feminist discourse patterns that undergird our relationships with one another as Black sister scholars as well as our relationships to our classroom teaching and research. We offer discussions of literacy research and theory, personal experience/ethos, linguistic knowledge, and critique of racism. Our article has implications for strengthening the academy’s understanding of Black female bodies/language in White university spaces still hell-bent on not welcoming/employing either. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of fifty-five profile pages of self-proclaimed gang members (Bloods and Crips) on Black Planet (BP), the biggest African American website. These share formal characteristics, as “repping” “representing” one’s gang, or “dissing” the rival gang. Considering the projection of their pages in a wider ecology (on- and off-line, on and off BP) and analyzing semiotic elements (chromatic, typographic choices, etc.), allows to highlight the “digital stylization” of these monologues and the junction between computer-mediated discourse and gang rhetoric, in the intimate yet open space of the profile.

This qualitative case study examined the effectiveness of a college writing curriculum centered on critical language awareness (CLA) aimed at promoting the written language skills of African American Language (AAL)-speaking students. The data collected and analyzed included students' pre-and-post essays. Results revealed that the CLA curriculum helped support students' development of critical consciousness, thereby providing them with the tools to replace feelings of what I have termed racialized writing trauma –i.e., feelings of writing anxiety, shame, and distress inflicted on racially and linguistically marginalized students as a result of linguistic racism, linguistic hegemony, and other systemic inequities in writing education–with a sense of writing liberation and empowerment. By the end of the study, the majority of the students evidenced written language growth in the following areas: (1) macro and micro level of writing, (2) syntactic fluency, and (3) rhetorical virtuosity. This article offers college writing instructors, specifically, and K-12 writing educators more generally a model of an evidence-based, anti-racist curricular intervention that has the potential to combat anti-Black racism and promote the writing performance, achievement, and matriculation of AAL-speaking students. Its implications are also applicable to second language writing instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines a social network site (SNS) where specific interlocutors communicate by combining aspects of academic American English (AE), digital language (DL), and African American Language (AAL)—creating a digital form of AAL or digital AAL (DAAL). This article describes the features of DAAL in the discursive, online context of MySpace, by analyzing a corpus of DAAL comments (1,494 instances). The use of SNSs affords a space where AAL exists in written form, serving the function of approximating spoken AAL. More interesting, however, is the function that DAAL serves as a text that is visually distinct from AE, emphasizing the orthographic freedom of DAAL on SNSs. By examining how DL and AAL exist and combine in an SNS environment, this research found DAAL to be a robust form of written communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study includes responses from two sets of focus group participants, comprised of African American Language (AAL) interlocutors who communicate using digital AAL in online spaces. Participants shared their thoughts about language, identity, and research regarding AAL. Focus groups were recorded and transcribed so that topics could be coded and categorized. Five core topics emerged: 1) History of AAL, 2) Digital Composing Choices, 3) Digital Research Methods, 4) Racial Issues, and 5) Personal Stories. The data obtained from the focus groups sheds light on participants' initial feelings of mistrust when discussing their language as well as their learned dislike for and unawareness of a language that they use every day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators often do not recognize biliteracy and bidialectalism in African American Language (AAL) speakers. Chronicling the experiences of twin four/five-year old AAL and emergent Standard English speakers, we discuss the importance of recognizing and building on the routines and identities of African American children and families. We present three strategies for supporting the learning of African American children who are biliterate and bidialectal. Using the academic literature which illustrates African American children's communicative virtuosity as a backdrop, we use language samples from twin AAL-speakers to illustrate key points. Emphasis is placed on the importance of building on African American children's communication styles in classrooms and helping them to negotiate and move between two different discourse communities for both oral and written language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this article, the author draws on critical race theory to examine Black female preservice teachers’ perspectives on their racial identity in relation to how they are positioned inside and outside the context of a traditional teacher education program in the United States. The author shares findings generated from a year-long ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of the discursive practices of Black female preservice teachers, all nonstandard language and dialect speakers, across three settings, including the university classroom, the K-12 practicum teaching classroom, and a social setting. Critical race theories and conversational analysis proved useful for revealing the deliberate decisions that these preservice teachers made about social and personal engagement and how these choices positioned themselves and each other as insiders within and beyond the dominant context of teacher education. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many of the literacies students possess go unnoticed or untapped in schools. In some cases, these hidden literacies are not seen or valued because they are not viewed as appropriate or relevant in relation to officially sanctioned, school-based literacies. The literature has shown that these hidden literacies are indeed valuable and relevant and need to be recognized and utilized, yet they continue to hide out in classrooms. Drawing on the body of work on hidden literacies and the metaphor of camouflage, this case study details hidden literacy practices during classroom literacy events in an English language arts classroom. Vignettes are presented featuring three different focal students actively hiding literacies through three different means—covering up, lying low, and blending in. This article suggests that looking for and focusing on instances of hiding in plain sight during literacy events can expose telling juxtapositions between students’ full repertoire of literacy practices, in the foreground, and the “appropriate” or normative literacy practices of schools, or backgrounds, against which they disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explicates the utility of a language planning perspective for understanding academic scholarship on socially stigmatized language varieties. The Oakland School Board resolution on Ebonics is shown to be the tip of a metaphorical iceberg referred to as the Ebonics phenomenon. It includes the body of linguistic knowledge on Black English, the critical reaction to it by Afrocentric scholars under the banner of Ebonics, and the visceral reactions of members of the general public to the incongruous idea of Ebonics ‘being taught in the schools.’ From the perspective of African Americans, the Ebonics phenomenon is a manifestation of the double consciousness of being pulled in two directions at once — toward the benefits of standard English speech and the intrinsic worth and beauty of talking Black. The discussion is organized into sections on corpus planning, status planning and language in education planning to illustrate the extent to which scholars of African American language have acted as language planning agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an overview of the research and educational public policy implications of work done on African American Language (also known as Black English, Black language, African American Vernacular English, Ebonics, and African American English). We begin with the Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board case in Ann Arbor, Michigan, because Judge Charles Joiner's 1979 ruling in that case served as an educational catalyst, resounding as loudly throughout the United States as ''the shot heard around the world.'' From the time of King through the end of the twentieth century, and on into the new millennium, there has been a voluminous body of research on the speech of Africans in America. This work has come not just from the field of linguistics, but also from speech pathology, education, psychology, literature, and African American Studies. We summarize the most critical research conducted during this period, including African-centered studies, as well as research efforts to resurrect the Anglicist paradigm. We conclude this article with a call for scholarly responsibility on the language question and a bold agenda for future research and public policy on language and the African American community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]