ROSE-MARIE WEBER
Reading Department
University at Albany, SUNY

Disentangling Dialect, Development, and Disorders

Malik Goes to School: Examining the Language Skills of African American Students From Preschool­5th Grade
By Holly K. Craig and Julie A. Washington. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. ix + 175 pp. Paper, $22.50.

In this book Holly Craig and Julie Washington bring together their studies on the linguistic accomplishments of children from preschool through the elementary grades who speak African American English, a variety of the language that is variously celebrated, reviled, and ignored in current American life in and out of schools (Alim, 2005; Baugh, 1999; Lanehart, 2001). For more than a decade they have led their cross-racial research group on an intensive effort to provide school people with the basis for making appropriate decisions about language instruction for speakers of this social dialect, especially those who have speech and language impairments. Craig and Washington make their professional home in the field of speech and language pathology, where distinguishing atypical from typical language development, sometimes complicated by dialect variation, is a major responsibility. In their work they have been especially concerned to examine the ways in which speech and language impairments must be distinguished from features of African American English. Although they have taken up various issues apart from impairment, they have reported their research almost entirely in journals in their home field rather than in educational or developmental psychology. It is to our benefit that they offer these 10 brief chapters in a book that reflects the integrity of their work, presenting the methods and outcomes of a research program of persuasive depth and breadth.