"The writing of African American students from the African American Language (AAL)-speaking culture has primarily been identified as substandard (Applebee & Langer, 2006; Ball, 1996; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012; Rickford, 1999; Smitherman, 1994). While hegemonic language attitudes and practices have been pinpointed as a contributing factor for this identification (Ball & Lardner, 2005; Charity-Hudley & Mallinson, 2011; Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003; Baugh, 1999), the larger concern-how to teach writing in ways that lead toward favorable experiences and outcomes for AAL-speaking students remains inadequately addressed; especially in composition. This study aimed to address the preceding concerns by applying critical language awareness (CLA) pedagogy to the design of a series of instructional units which sought to improve AAL-speaking students' critical consciousness of language, writing, and society. The innovative series of instructional units employed African American-centered literature, novels, poetry, hip-hop, and new media in order to teach AAL-speaking students about language, linguistic variation, discourse, and power. To understand the possibilities and accessibility of the CLA approach to writing instruction, one composition instructor participated in a one-day critical language awareness teacher preparation program and subsequently implemented the series of instructional units with several AAL-speaking students in composition courses at a public, urban, research university over a six-week time span. Multiple types of qualitative data (oral, textual and visual) were collected in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the one-day critical language awareness teacher preparation program and the CLA approach to writing instruction. Analyses of essays, questionnaires, and classroom discussions reveal how the: (1) composition instructor was able to become more aware of the social and cultural contexts of AAL and more conscious of her own linguistic prejudices; thus providing the composition instructor with the tools to resocialize her hegemonic and oppressive dispositions toward language into pluralistic and emancipatory dispositions toward language, and (2) AAL-speaking were able to become more aware of writing processes and practices and more conscious of their own writer's identity; thus providing the AAL-speaking students with the tools to work critically within and across a variety of languages, including AAL, mainstream language, and code-meshing language, and enhance their writing in several areas, including ideas, voice, language facility, and conventions. Overall, this study highlights the possibilities (and challenges) of fashioning CLA pedagogy into accessible and relevant writing curricula for culturally and linguistically diverse students."--Pages ii-iii.
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