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Letter from the Program Author Many students across the United States speak African American English (AAE), one of the numerous dialects of English. However, teachers and teaching materials, especially text books that are read in classrooms, use Mainstream Classroom English (MCE). MCE is a much more formal and academic version of Mainstream English (ME) which is spoken by many Americans of all races and ethnicities. Considerable recent research has shown that African American students in the elementary grades who can speak both AAE and MCE are more successful learning to read than their classmates who do not learn to speak the primary language of the classroom. This book is one of a series of story books designed to help students understand that different people speak different dialects of English. This particular book focuses on one feature of AAE– the agreement of subjects and verbs in number and person (“he gives ,” “he give ”). In AAE, it is “correct” for some grammatical forms such as the “s” at the end of a present tense verb to be included or excluded, depending on the context of the sentence. In addition, AAE speakers use only “was” in past tense sentences where ME and MCE speakers would say “was” or “were” depending on the number of the subject in the sentence. So “This garden need work” is acceptable when speaking AAE, and so is “We was surprised that anything grew there at all.” However, in ME and MCE, the “s” must always be included, and “were” used for plural subjects. We have used boxes to highlight these forms, with “s” and “were” inside a box— s — and —were— when they are included (ME), and an empty box— —or one containing was when the character spoke using the AAE feature. In this story, the narrator, Mr. Smith, Principal Jones, and Mr. Green all speak ME. When Maya, the main character of the story talks, she includes forms like present tense “s” sometimes and other times she omits it. She is a skilled speaker of both dialect forms and so shifts from one to the other depending on the context. For example, Maya speaks ME to Mr. Smith, Principal Jones, and Mr. Green, who are speakers of ME, but says, “Our neighborhood look bad now, but I hope it’ll look better soon,” to her friends. At the back of the book, we provide additional information about the rationale for developing this series of books, the research supporting them, additional information about the characteristics of AAE, and a recommended set of background readings on these topics. For those interested in learning more about children who speak AAE, this information should be helpful to you. Enjoy! Sincerely, Holly K. Craig, Ph.D. Project Director Michigan-Project on Oral language, Writing, and Reading (M-POWR) Funded by: U.S. Department of Education Grant R305A100284