The Language Gap: Impending Crisis or Deficit Distraction?

The Language Gap provides an accessible review of the language gap research, illuminating what we know and what we do not know about the language development of youth from working and lower socioeconomic classes. Written to offer a balanced look at existing literature, this text analyzes how language gap research is portrayed in the media and how debatable research findings have been portrayed as common sense facts. This text additionally analyzes how language gap research has impacted educational policies, and will be the first book-length overview addressing this area of rapidly growing interest.

David Cassels Johnson is Associate Professor of Multilingual Education at the University of Iowa and Visiting Professor of Applied Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University. He holds a PhD (with distinction) in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Language Policy (2013) and co-editor of Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide (2015, with Francis M. Hult).

Eric J. Johnson is Professor of Bilingual Education at Washington State University. He received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Arizona State University. His research focuses on ethnographic approaches to immigrant education programs and language policies in public schools. His publications span topics involving bilingual education, immigration, and family engagement.