Annotated bibliography

Ball, Arnetha. "Expository Writing Patterns of African American Students." The English Journal 85.1 (1996): 27-36.

This article discusses various patterns in speech and writing unique to African American students. Ball argues that certain African discursive patterns, often identified as lacking academic language and criteria, actually reflect various requirements necessary for academic writing. Although these language patterns are often viewed as non-standard, they do take into account skills such as literary analysis and use of personal experience as evidence. Ball concludes that students can effectively draw on African and AfricanAmerican-based linguistic and rhetorical patterns and still meet the requirements for their expository writing assignments at the same time.

Gilyard, Keith, and Elaine Richardson. "Students' Right to Possibility: Basic Writing and African American Rhetoric." Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies. Ed. Andrea Greenbaum. Albany: SUNY UP, 2001.

In their essay, Keith Gilyard and Elaine Richardson, “Students’ Right to Possibility: Basic Writing and African American Rhetoric,” apply SRTOL to composition classroom practices. They argue that SRTOL is still controversial because many teachers still believe that they should be “preparing so-called minority students for success in the market place, all while many of the most successful people in the market place are running off with fresh stacks of pretty little green ones accumulated to the advertising beat of hip hop” (38). Gilyard and Richardson describe and analyze their own study on fifty-two African American students who enrolled in an Afrocentric basic writing course. Researchers were looking specifically at rhetorical and modes of Africanized discoursed used in the student essays. For each student enrolled, a panel of writing specialists (from varied racial/ethnic backgrounds) scored their out of class essays. Like Smitherman’s 1994 study on NAEP high school students, the researchers found that “African American students who used more Black discourse scored higher than those students who did not” (45). Hence, Gilyard and Richardson conclude that African American rhetoric and discourse can serve as an opportunity for applying SRTOL to classroom practices.

Hollie, Sharroky. “Acknowledging the Language of African American Students: Instructional Strategies.” The English Journal 90.4 (2000): 54-59.

Hollie discusses how the Linguistic Affirmation Program (a comprehensive non-standard language awareness program designed to serve the language needs of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Hawaiian Americans, and Native American students who are not proficient in Standard English) is an effective program to teach Standard English without devaluing the languages students bring from home. The article also discusses six key instructional approaches to teaching Standard English to students whose first language is another language.

Juzwik et al. “Writing Into the 21st Century: An Overview of Research on Writing, 1999 – 2004.” Written Communications 23.4 (2006): 451-476.

In their article, “Writing Into the 21st Century: An Overview of Research on Writing, 1999 to 2004,” Juzwik et al. found that “[c]ontext and writing practices; multilingualism, bilingualism, and writing; and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems in contemporary writing research” (464). What is unclear in their study, however, is the proportion of those research studies that actually employ teacher-research as the primary methodology. From Juzwik et al.’s study, categories such as writing instruction and multilingualism/bidialectalism become very large categories that may account for a wide range of methodologies (including but not limited to teacher-research), contexts, and settings. Of the research categories studied between 1999 and 2004, how many studies were teacher-research? How might these categories have changed in the last five years, where we have seen a decline and teacher-research empirical work published in journals associated with composition studies?