In today's culturally diverse classrooms, students possess and use many culturally, ethnically, and regionally diverse English language varieties that may differ from standardized English. This book helps classroom teachers become attuned to these differences and offers practical strategies to support student achievement while fostering positive…

This volume brings together research carried out in a variety of geographic and linguistic contexts including Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States and explores efforts to incorporate linguistic diversity into education and to "harness" this diversity for learners' benefit. It challenges the largely…

Current research in linguistic typology shows some syntactic processes, such as rightward dislocation of modifiers, to be characteristic of certain types of languages, and that a language of that type without such processes is "unnatural" and likely to develop them. For instance, almost all languages with order Verb-Object (VO) have dislocation…

The papers in this collection provide a brief state-of-the-art statement on the role of non-standard dialects of English in education and on some implications of the Ann Arbor decision. The following papers are included: (1) "Vernacular Black English: Setting the Issues in Time," by Roger W. Shuy; (2) "Beyond Black English:…

This book looks at the essential dynamics of language contact and linguistic assimilation from a current sociolinguistic perspective by focusing on the English of second generation Puerto Rican teen-agers in New York City. General sociolinguistic principles are extrapolated from the author's detailed investigation of several linguistic variables…

This work seeks to fill important gaps existing in the study of Peninsular Arabic, especially that of the United Arab Emirates. It presents an explicit outline of the structure of Gulf Arabic, based on the dialect of Abu Dhabi. It is intended for students and teachers of Gulf Arabic, for linguists and dialectologists, and for other individuals who…

This book is a collection of conference proceedings, papers, comments, and other documents that was compiled as a response to the national controversy that erupted in the aftermath of the resolution on Ebonics by the Oakland Unified School District in late 1996. That resolution affirmed the need to incorporate an explicit focus on Ebonics in…

The recent discussions about the teaching of Black English, known as Ebonics, in the Oakland (California) school district have highlighted concerns about the right way to educate African American children. The authors of essays in this collection offer background history that explores the race and power dynamics surrounding the development of…

This book presents some language studies which have been conducted with children from lower socioeconomic and minority groups over the past four years (1972-1976). These and other studies indicate that children who live in poverty can succeed in school and that, when these children do not succeed, it is due more to a failure of the school to…

This is a supplementary dictionary of the Spanish spoken by Chicanos in the states of Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida. The nearly 8,000 entries represent a compilation of Chicano words and phrases not typically found in standard dictionaries. Items are listed alphabetically in Spanish, followed by an English…

The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate that the fields of linguistics, dialectology, language education, and early reading would be well served by a word book of the Black English vernacular. Chapters are devoted to discussion of the social significance of a lexicon of Black English vernacular, the terminology of sex and lovemaking, religion…

In this study, two hypotheses are examined: (1) There is a positive correlation between the incidence of dialect speech of black second graders and their perception that dialect speech is "bad." (2) Use of dialect speech does not interfere with the speaker's ability to identify words in traditional orthography. The study established language…

In the past, social lectologists have not considered their work as contrastive linguistics. One reason is that sociolects of a language differ quantitatively; differences lie in the frequency patterns with which certain forms occur in each lect. Contrastive linguistics deals with standard or idealized languages, while sociolects are often…

An attempt is made in this book to state some of the features of and dispel some of the myths about nonstandard English, particularly the dialects of English spoken by many black Americans, and to consider alternative policies that might be adopted regarding varied forms of English. The chapters of the book include "What Is the Problem?""Is…

This book is a talking tour of American English. Short easy-to-read essays explicate the key features that make American speech so expressive and distinct. The tour begins in the South, home of the most easily recognized of American dialects, travels north the New England, then west to the Midwest, and on to the far west and Alaska and Hawaii. In…