Title: Ways with Words: language, life

and work in communities and classrooms

First published in 1983

18th printing in 2009

Published by Cambridge University

Press, New York, NY

Written by Shirley Brice Heath

A study in ethnography

Author: Shirley Brice Heath

Linguistic anthropologist – “who studies learners across

the life span in non-formal environments of learning”.

Her focus is on “the ways in which speakers, young and

old, learn the structures and uses of language as well as

the attitudes, gestures, and interactional ways called for

in learning environments of all types”.

She has completed extensive ethnographic research in

communities throughout the United States, for five

decades

She has published 10 books and a long list of articles

She has a number of academic awards from

international universities

She is the Margery Bailey Professor of English and

Dramatic Literature, and Professor of Linguistics and

Anthropology, Stanford University, Emerita

(Accessed from http://www.shirleybriceheath.net/index.htm )

During the late 1960s until the end of the 1970s, Heath

studied two neighbourhood communities a few miles apart

from one another in the Piedmont Carolinas. She immersed

herself in to the communities in order to record the details of

the children’s language acquisition and their daily life

activities. She later connected the cultural findings to their

educational needs and how teachers could best facilitate

learning.

Heath focused on answering the question: What are the

effects of preschool home and community environments on

learning? She believed that children learn how to act, what

to believe and what to value through “face to face”

communication. The immediate geography and social

conditions of their community contributed to their

development as talkers, readers and writers.

Heath looked at language patterns of children’s responses to

“what”, “how” and “why”. She concluded that language

acquisition is influenced by: history, community ecology,

resources, motivation and opportunities.

The study takes place:

During the era of desegregation for Blacks and Whites in

the Carolina states, U.S.

In the late 1960s until the end of the 1970s

When teachers became concerned with how to teach

writing to children who had different ways of talking.