Arguing against the tougher standards rhetoric that marks the current education debate, the author of No Contest and Punished by Rewards writes that such tactics squeeze the pleasure out of learning. Reprint.

Varieties of English in the U.S. and Canada display fascinating developments from colonial times up until the twenty-first century. To throw light on the linguistics of North American Englishes and their socio-historical contexts, this volume brings together research from various traditions, including corpus linguistics, variation studies, dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, language ideology, and the enregisterment framework. In the ten chapters of the volume, a wide variety of sources, published and unpublished, containing evidence of past language use in the U.S. and Canada are introduced and exploited for novel insights. Among the research questions addressed are the following: how to best model the emergence of new varieties of English in North America? Are morphological Americanisms historical retentions, post-colonial revivals, or progressive innovations? What is distinctly Canadian in the context of North American Englishes? How can synchronic dialects be used to examine trajectories of change in the history of Canadian English?