There is an old proverbial tale about a son who asked his father why it was that in all the stories he read about lions and men fighting in the jungle, the lion always loses. The father replied, "Son, it will always be that way until the lion learns how to write." - (Smitherman, 2000, p. 68)1

The quotation that opens this editorial is from Smitherman (2000 [1988]), who is a noted linguist, educational activist, and strong advocate for deeper appreciation of the richness and power of African American English (AAE). I have followed Smitherman's work over the years since hearing her speak at Wichita State University during my early doctoral studies. It was around 1970, a time when the Civil Rights Movement was on everyone's mind, and emotions were running high. I was one of a very few White students taking courses in AAE (called Black English at the time), and it was a humbling experience, but one that has shaped my career.

Smitherman, both then and in her later writings (2000 [1988]), much like the lion in the proverb, has helped move the rhetoric about AAE toward deeper understandings and fresh perspectives. Among her many contributions, Smitherman has cautioned that sociolinguistic research, which often has involved counting morphosyntactic features and making comparisons, can be a subtle form of linguistic racism. In her 1988 essay, Smitherman observed that "the academic discourse on black language that came from ethnographers was significant as a corrective to the obsession with the quantitative paradigm that characterized the work of the sociolinguists" (p. 83). It was ethnographers who observed that language cannot be abstracted from the sociocultural context and who argued that a power differential needs to be acknowledged as part of this context. Smitherman also called for more research "on the sociolinguistic rules governing conversation, information processing, the use of social rituals, such as greetings, farewells, compliment giving, forms of address, and other discourse features" (p. 92).

As noted by Hyter and Rivers (2015) in their Issue Editor Foreword, the need for research on the pragmatic aspects of the discourse of children and adolescents in the African American community continued to be as pressing in 2013, when they and their colleagues initiated the idea for this issue of Topics in Language Disorders, as it was when Smitherman made her plea for more research of this type in the 1980s. A similar call has been echoed by researchers with a background in clinical speech-language pathology and language science, including Ida Stockman, to whom Hyter and Rivers have dedicated this issue.

Specialists in language disorders tend to be attuned to the importance of avoiding sociolinguistic bias in identifying children in need of language intervention services. As clinicians, we run the risk, however, of becoming overly focused on identifying problems and targeting them in intervention. This lens can obscure the importance of embracing communicative strengths and encouraging originality and elaboration of expression, regardless of whether the children and adolescents under our tutelage have been identified as having language disorders or not.

Drawing attention to the richness of the less studied pragmatic elements of communication among African American children and adolescents is a major contribution of this issue. Beyond reducing poor decision making stemming from confusing difference with disorder, information about these pragmatic elements can raise awareness of teachers and clinicians, as well as sociolinguists and other researchers, to uniquely rich and powerful elements in the discourse of African American children and adolescents.

The articles in this issue contribute to weaving what Hyter and Rivers (2015) characterize as a "rich tapestry." Contributions include a critical synthesis of prior literature (Hyter, Rivers, & DeJarnette, 2015), a research report on using puppets and an emotion-explanation task to observe pragmatic skills of African American preschoolers (Curenton, 2015), an article explaining the importance of developing pragmatic codes that fit the population being studied rather than trying to force-fit an existing coding system to the population (DeJarnette, Rivers, & Hyter, 2015), a research report on using the favorite game or sport task to assess pragmatic and syntactic aspects of expository discourse of school-age African American students (Koonce, 2015), and a research report on pragmatic features in original narratives written by African American fourth-, sixth-, and ninth-grade students compared with their European American peers. (Kersting, Anderson, Newkirk-Turner, & Nelson, 2015).

These articles make an important contribution to filling the research gap that is highlighted by Hyter et al. (2015) in their research review and synthesis and which led to the conceptualization of this issue. Reading formal research summaries and studies can only scratch the surface, however, for clinicians wishing to heighten their awareness of how a certain head gesture, facial expression, choice of vocabulary, tone of voice, or turn of a phrase can communicate unique aspects of an individual's cultural-linguistic heritage and contribute to deeper meanings. Such elements are difficult to capture in scientific studies and reports. Clinicians can broaden their awareness and appreciation of variation in communicative pragmatics across sociolinguistic groups by becoming expert "kid watchers." This involves making culturally sensitive (aka ethnographic) observations while interacting in unobtrusive ways with preschool-age children from different cultural-linguistic groups as they engage in dramatic play or in listening to school-age children and adolescents as they read their original stories or essays aloud. The articles in this issue provide multiple frameworks from which to conduct such observations and capture evidence of children's strengths. I think readers will agree with me that Hyter and Rivers and their invited contributors have met their goal to begin to fill the critical gap in the literature on pragmatic aspects of communication among African American children and adolescents.

-Nickola Wolf Nelson, PhD, CCC-SLP

Editor

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