African American English in Urban Education: A Multimethodological Approach to Understanding Classroom Discourse Strategies

Discrepancies between 'home English' and 'school English' for urban students have been addressed for decades by a number of scholars in the fields of linguistics, education, and sociology (Baratz 1969, Baugh 1995, Charity et al 2004, Alim 2009, Edwards 2010). Those students who speak prestige varieties of English tend to do better in school settings, in which the teacher's language is that of the mainstream middle class. Charity Hudley and Mallinson (2011: 77) note, '[e]ducators and students who come from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds may be unaware of, confused by, or ill equipped to understand each other's linguistic and cultural behaviors.' Some researchers have examined teachers' contrastive analysis of non-prestige varieties of English with that of the prestige variety (Pandey 2000, Wheeler and Swords 2006), but rarely has the teachers' acquisition of non-prestige forms been examined in any form (a notable exception is Fogel and Ehri 2006). Furthermore, no study to date has taken a multimethodological approach to understanding both student and teacher discourse strategies in the urban classroom. Citation reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC. Abridged abstract reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC. Full text available at URL below.