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Current work in linguistics is not well represented in the school curriculum in the USA, partly because of a mismatch with traditional foci in the K‐12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) standard course of studies and because there are very few materials for teaching about the nature of language and language variation. This article sketches the process of developing curricular materials to accompany the 3‐hour video documentary, Do You Speak American? and suggests some of the decisions that must be made in developing materials for educational settings concerning scientific knowledge about language.

Discourse analysis of interaction in a course on language and literacy development elucidates and exemplifies how preschool teachers constructed new knowledge that can be assumed to contribute to the improved literacy instruction observed in their classrooms. An analytic framework rooted in socio-cultural theory and interactional sociolinguistic methods foregrounds the issues of whose sentiments and knowledge got taken up on the conversational floor and what specific new knowledge was conversationally constructed. We use this framework to explicate a discussion in which the teachers and the instructor assembled a knowledge structure. The group’s emergent response to a question gained propositional content as participants jointly created and used social and informational resources. This approach allows insight into the sociolinguistic processes that contribute to effective professional development experiences.