Reviews public expressions about the state of the English language and attempts to show that this interest in language should be viewed by language professionals as an opportunity to clarify issues. Four strategies are presented dealing with language variability, linguistics, and the "joy" and usefulness of language variation. (Author/AMH)

Two articles examine Ebonics and its relation to the teaching of English as a Second Language. The first suggests that teachers of English, literacy instructors, and educational policy makers need to take language differences into account. The second suggests that the issues around Ebonics are the issues vital to all language educators--language,…

This paper traces the history of changing attitudes toward American English. Two approaches to language policy have always been present, the conservative one, which considers British English the only acceptable standard, and the liberal, which favors American English. (CFM)

Some data dispute the common assumption of linguists that speakers of nonstandard varieties of English lack functional command of Standard English. Hawaiian high school students were found equally competent in Standard and Hawaiian English. Implications of this finding for educational practices in Hawaii are discussed. (CHK)

Drawing on reflections of a teacher-researcher in a community-based adult ESL classroom in Toronto, Canada, explores the relationship between identity and intonation. Presents an account of teaching intonation to a group of predominantly Chinese immigrant women, and discusses an activity that develops awareness of sentence-level intonation as a…

Compares the ideology of English monolingualism with a standard language ideology used to position speakers of different varieties of the same language within a social hierarchy. The article discusses the connection between assumptions underlying linguistic ideologies and other social ideologies related to individualism and social mobility. (104…

Suggests that English-as-an-International-Language (EIL) and interlanguage, in recent years, have emerged as two major developments in applied linguistics and language-teaching studies. Three questions are addressed concerning EIL and language teaching. (27 references) (Author/VWL)

Educational programs for teachers of English as a Second Language must devote more attention to differences between the standard varieties of American and British English, with instruction focusing on the major orthographic, morphological, syntactic, collocational, and lexical differences. (CB)

Summarizes research on educational programs that use stigmatized varieties of English in the classroom, and reviews relevant theory and research in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition. Research on educational programs shows that using the stigmatized variety in formal education seems to have a positive effect on the acquisition of…