African American students from dialectally diverse backgrounds bring to school

teachers lack the linguistic training

In 2002, her firstyear of implementing code-switching strategies, she closed the achievement gap in herclassroom; on standardized state assessments, African American students did as well aswhite students in English and history and outperformed white students in math and science.

code-switch — to assess the needs of the setting (the time, place,audience, and communicative purpose) and intentionally choose the appropriate languagestyle for that setting.

metacognition, which is knowledge about one's own thinking processes.

A linguistically informed teacher understands that these usages are not errors, but rathergrammar patterns from the community dialect transferred into student writing (Wheeler,2005).

Students using vernacularlanguage are not making errors, but instead are speaking or writing correctly following thelanguage patterns of their community (

Further, research has found strong connections among teachers' negative attitudes aboutstigmatized dialects, lower teacher expectations for students who speak these dialects, andlower academic achievement (Godley et al., 2006; Nieto, 2000)

"demands a new way of looking at teaching that is grounded in anunderstanding of the role of culture and language in learning" (Villegas & Lucas, 2007, p. 29).

teacher education and professional development programs fail toequip teachers to respond adequately to the needs of many African American learners.

teachers routinelyunderrate the language knowledge and the reading and writing performance of AfricanAmerican students (Cazden, 2001; Ferguson, 1998; Godley, Sweetland, Wheeler, Minnici, &rCarpenter, 2006; Scott & Smitherman, 1985)