?Why can?t writing courses be taught like this fo real?: Leveraging critical language awareness to promote African American Language speakers? writing skills

This qualitative case study examined the effectiveness of a college writing curriculum centered on critical language awareness (CLA) aimed at promoting the written language skills of African American Language (AAL)-speaking students. The data collected and analyzed included students' pre-and-post essays. Results revealed that the CLA curriculum helped support students' devel-opment of critical consciousness, thereby providing them with the tools to replace feelings of what I have termed racialized writing trauma -i.e., feelings of writing anxiety, shame, and distress inflicted on racially and linguistically marginalized students as a result of linguistic racism, lin-guistic hegemony, and other systemic inequities in writing education-with a sense of writing liberation and empowerment. By the end of the study, the majority of the students evidenced written language growth in the following areas: (1) macro and micro level of writing, (2) syntactic fluency, and (3) rhetorical virtuosity. This article offers college writing instructors, specifically, and K-12 writing educators more generally a model of an evidence-based, anti-racist curricular intervention that has the potential to combat anti-Black racism and promote the writing per-formance, achievement, and matriculation of AAL-speaking students. Its implications are also applicable to second language writing instruction.