| 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. |
