ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the major lines of research focusing on African American children who speak AAE. No line of research is exclusively associated with a single scholar or language laboratory. Whereas the study of child AAE speakers is a fairly recent focus for intensive inquiry, most researchers have had to address issues framed within more than one major line of research at one time or another, as they lay the groundwork for their own research programs. This cross-fertilization of ideas, questions, and methods has led to tremendous growth in our understanding of the African American child, child AAE, and associated language and literacy relationships. Four major lines of research are apparent in the extant literature: the search for unique features, the development of an inventory of child AAE features and the distributional properties of the inventory, the development of nondiscriminatory language and literacy evaluation procedures, and understanding the challenges faced by the AAE-speaking student in academic contexts. Each of these lines of research is discussed in the following sections.
