Many African American children make use of African American English (AAE) in their everyday lives, and face academic barriers when introduced to Standard American English (SAE) in the classroom. Research has shown that students who can adapt and use SAE for academic purposes demonstrate significantly better test scores than their less adaptable…

In a national context where the language rights of indigenous people have been recognized constitutionally since 2003, we deal with the following questions: How can bilingual education programmes in Mexico be clearly defined and applied? And what exactly are the final objectives of a bilingual education programme? We shall address the issue of the…

Secondary English teachers are charged with helping all students to read, write, and understand English in its many forms and functions. However, students' language can be as diverse as the literature teachers bring to the classroom. Not all students come to the classroom with the skills to write standardized English; even fewer students come with…

Linguistic structures and cultural conflicts are the reasons why African-American students fare poorly in literacy instructions in classrooms. Some ideas for creating an accessible, research-based approach to language arts in dialectally diverse classrooms are presented.

Examines the role and significance of systematic error correction and explicit grammatical explanation in adult foreign language education. The type and nature of certain grammatical errors which are characteristic of the interlanguage of Arab learners of English as a second language and which seem insusceptible to defossilization are…

This paper explores the long and winding road to integrating linguistic approaches to vernacular dialects in the classroom. After exploring past roadblocks, the author shares vignettes and classroom practices of her collaborator, Rachel Swords, who has succeeded in bringing Contrastive Analysis and Code-switching to her second and third-grade…

Language educators find two kinds of errors in the interlanguages of language learners: developmental and interference. While developmental errors reflect a normal pattern of development common among all language learners, interference errors are caused by the learners' native languages. This paper deals with a number of die-hard types of…