ABSTRACT
The many debates concerning multilingual and bidialectical students (Baugh, 1983; Jordan, 1985; Kinloch, 2005b; Smitherman, 2003), particularly in the context of public education in America, reiterate the importance of examining public attitudes toward language as well as teacher dispositions, instructional approaches, and classroom teaching methods. From the Ann Arbor Black English court case (1979) to the English Only Movement (1980s) and the Oakland Ebonics debate (1996), approaches to working with linguistically diverse students-variously labeled “people of color,” “poor,” “working class,” and “urban”—have been met with criticism and resistance. Since the 1960s, professional organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and the Modern Language Association (MLA), despite diverse-exclusive histories, have made attempts to address a crisis in secondary and college-level classrooms created by “the cultural and linguistic mismatch between higher education and the nontraditional (by virtue of Color or class) students who were making their imprint upon the academic landscape for the first time in history” (Smitherman, 2003, p. 19). This mismatch resulted, in part, from the history of racism, segregation, and academic exclusion of people of color from American higher education, which in turn ignited rights’ movements of the 1960s and public outcries at the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
