ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a new and comprehensive curriculum designed for students at school entry that incorporates the core components shown to be important for a bi-dialectal teaching program with African American English (AAE)-speaking students. It describes the author's own approach to the teaching of bi-dialectalism, built upon knowledge gained from my approximately 25 years of research, and upon the foundations laid by prior curriculum developers. Code-switching program for AAE-speaking students to learn to use Standard American English (SAE) was developed for kindergarten and first grade students as they entered into formal schooling, a curricular focus presenting both theoretical advantages and significant challenges. Contrastive Analysis (CA) is highly regarded as an approach to the teaching of bi-dialectalism in part because the methods are positive and constructive, and respect the student and the student's heritage language. The main focus was to teach shifting from AAE to SAE, the Dialect Assessment Battery (DAB) only evaluated student production of SAE.
