ABSTRACT
The child continues to expand his or her knowledge of vocabulary, and greater use of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions, and verbal expressions is demonstrated. The excerpt comes from a special symposium of academic sociolinguists convened in the 1980s to address language change in African American English-speaking populations—as well as the impact of this linguistic change on the educational experience of African American English-speaking children. Specifically, these sociolinguists study the nature of language variation in part to understand how language changes and why, as well as to uncover which social forces correlate with language change. The chapter examines the importance of linguistically informed accounts of English Language Learner identification in multidialectal speech communities. In order to provide effective English as a Second Language services to students who have a genuine need, nonstandard English speakers first must be distinguished from English Language Learners.
