A Survey of Bidialectal Language Arts Programs in the United States

Since the early 1960's, the topic of language variation has been one of great interest to scholars and practitioners in a number of academic and professional disciplines in the United States. To be sure, variations within languages did not begin only two decades ago. Variations (dialects) have existed within the languages of the world throughout recorded linguistic history.1 And, of course, variations in the way the English language is spoken in the United States have existed since the time of the early settlers. Interest in the topic of language variation has risen within the last twenty years for a number of social, economic, political, and legal reasons. For example, the increasing number of ethnic minorities in the population, the dismantling of racial segregation in the nation's schools, the high correlation between socioeconomic class and language behavior, and legislative mandates and court decisions pertaining to the rights of speakers of various languages and dialects have all contributed to the high interest in language variation. The major focus of the discussions concerning language variation within the literature, as well as within linguistics and education professions, has been how non-standard English dialects are to be handled in the nation's schools. The traditional role of schools with respect to language has-been to teach students the skill of speaking, writing, and reading the language of education, that is, standard English. Within this framework, three major options have been proposed concerning the issue of language variation: (1) eradicate all non-standard English dialects and teach standard English as a replacement

Language arts · Mathematics education · Political science · Sociology · The arts · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Psychology · Second Language Learning and Teaching

• African American English and other Vernaculars in Education

  Open Access•John R Rickford, Julie Sweetland et al.•Journal of English Linguistics•2004

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• So Much Research, So Little Change”

  Rebecca Wheeler•Annual Review of Linguistics•2016

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