Heath, Shirley Brice JENNIFER MCCREIGHT, ROBERTA GARDNER, JAYE THIEL, AND JOBETH ALLEN Shirley Brice Heath (1939– ), a linguistic anthropologist, works at the macro and micro levels to study language in political and sociocultural contexts. The largest body of her ethnographic work examines the ways that children and young adults develop language and social practices in families, friendship groups, and community youth organizations. She received a BA (1962) from Lynchburg College, an MA (1964) from Ball State University, and a PhD (1970) from Columbia University where she specialized in Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics, Comparative Education, and Latin American Studies. She holds the Margery Bailey Professorship in English and Dramatic Literature and a Professorship in Linguistics (Emerita) at Stanford University, where she taught from 1980 to 2003. She was professor at large, Brown University (2003–10) and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania; Kings College, University of London; University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; University of Washington; and the University of Colorado. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Grawemeyer Award in Education (with Milbrey McLaughlin), the George & Louise Spindler Award in Educational Anthropology, the Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award, American Association for Applied Linguistics, and the Distinguished Educator Award from the American Education Research Association. A prominent voice in applied linguistics internationally, Heath has conducted research in Mexico, Guatemala, South Africa, the United States, England, Germany, Australia, and Sweden. Heath’s earliest work focused on language policies in Mexico (1972) and the United States (1981). In the 1970s, she began ethnographic fieldwork with families in textile mill communities in the southeastern US Piedmont region. She studied 300 families in White, working-class Roadville and nearby Black, working-class Trackton, reporting this decade of work in her ethnography Ways With Words (1983/1996; henceforth WWW) which remains a cornerstone in applied linguistics, showing the relationship between micro- and macro- level discourse, and the effects of children’s early language and literacy experiences on their lives inside and outside of school. Employing Hymes’s “ethnography of communica- tion,” with its focus on connections among language, community, and identity, Heath studied discourse in these communities as shared events, embedded in social practices. Heath (1982) developed the notion of literacy events, an interaction around a piece of writing, as a tool for examining various forms and functions of oral and written language. She documented very different “ways with words,” both in ideology and use, by linking shared language practices to larger societal discourses. She found that the rich language and literacy skills of children in Trackton were not initially valued in school. Questions in school bore little resemblance to parental interrogatives; Trackton parents did not ask “known-answer” questions, so their children were often confused when teachers requested them. School texts and tests called for literal answers; Trackton children were skilled at metaphor, imaginative stories, and arguing claims. Children from Roadville did well in primary grades, but less well by third grade, when school tasks demanded more than factual recall. In contrast, the literacy background of the townspeople’s children largely matched that of school and led to school success. In the second part of WWW, Heath and The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0495