ABSTRACT
This chapter reiterates the major points, and makes a final plea for continuing and extending our systematic curricular work in the area of dialectal code-switching for African American English (AAE)-speaking students. Research conducted during the last decade, however, indicates that equipping teachers with the skills they need to teach dialectal code-switching provides a partial education-based solution to helping resolve the Black-White Achievement Gap. Teaching code-switching is an empirically-driven pedagogy which is supported by the linguistic and early-education research communities. Contrastive Analysis (CA) has proven itself to be an effective and efficient methodology for teachers and students to use to engage in activities which compare and contrast dialectal differences between AAE and Standard American English (SAE). The rationale for developing dialectal code-switching curricula, therefore, is grounded in the needs of AAE-speaking students and the current lack of knowledge of most teachers about how to teach conventional forms of Standard English as a basis for literacy learning.
