Beyond Ebonics

While ebonics, or "black English," is probably the most widely recognizable and most debated dialect in classrooms across the United States, it's far from the only one. For the past six years, Maria Montaño-Harmon, a professor of secondary education at California State University-Fullerton, has run workshops for teachers in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas on "Chicano English," a subject of sociolinguistic research since the 1970s. She also conducts a weeklong summer institute each year titled "Developing English for Academic Purposes."

In part, the dialect is a carryover from Spanish. But it's not limited to bilingual children who learned English as a second language, Montaño-Harmon says. Dialect forms also surface among U.S.-born Mexican-American children who live in predominantly Mexican-American neighborhoods but may or may not live in predominantly Spanish-speaking homes.

The professor's work with teachers focuses on encouraging student participation in the classroom, improving English literacy, and understanding language appropriateness. The message: Language is a matter of situation, and children need to know...