Literacy in African American Communities

Thông tin sách: Literacy in African American Communities (Paperback, 340 trang) – Routledge, 2000. Ngôn ngữ: Tiếng Anh.

This volume explores the unique sociocultural contexts of literacy development, values, and practices in African American communities. African Americans--young and old--are frequently the focus of public discourse about literacy. In a society that values a rather sophisticated level of literacy, they are among those who are most disadvantaged by low literacy achievement. Literacy in African American Communities contributes a fresh perspective by revealing how social history and cultural values converge to influence African Americans' literacy values and practices, acknowledging that literacy issues pertaining to this group are as unique and complex as this group's collective history. Existing literature on literacy in African American communities is typically segmented by age or academic discipline. This fragmentation obscures the cyclical, life-span effects of this population's legacy of low literacy. In contrast, this book brings together in a single-source volume personal, historical, developmental, and cross-disciplinary vantage points to look at both developmental and adult literacy from the perspectives of education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and communication sciences and disorders. As a whole, it provides important evidence that the negative cycle of low literacy can be broken by drawing on the literacy experiences found within African American communities.

Editorial Reviews Review

"State-of-the-art research from a viewpoint not yet seen in the literature....Provides much needed empirical data, from the perspectives of linguists, speech-language pathologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and educators, addressing various issues surrounding literacy in African American communities across the human life span."
―Sharon E. Moss
American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

"An urgent and important topic....The experts assembled are a good mixture of practitioners and researchers in literacy and related disciplines."
―Violet J. Harris
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

About the Author Joyce L. Harris, Alan G. Kamhi, Karen E. Pollock