The ways speakers of Black English modify features of their spoken dialect in the process of adapting their language to writing are examined in this dissertation, on the basis of a corpus of writing from 41 black students enrolled in a St. Louis community college composition course. Each student is represented by 500 to 1000 words of writing…

This study examines linguistic form and communication style in working-class and middle-class black preachers of two types: those who are not seminary trained, who preach spontaneously, and those who are seminary trained, who read from a prepared text. Ten sermons were tape-recorded in natural settings at two churches in Washington, D.C. Analyses…

This dissertation describes a study of the Black English Vernacular (BEV) based on 350 compositions written in the college classroom by 42 black students from working class and lower class families in a predominantly white university. The correlation between certain extralinguistic variables and over 20 linguistic variables was examined. Although…

The purposes of this study were to identify the attitudes and behavior of teachers in an innercity secondary school toward language in general and nonstandard grammar in particular. Responses of the 18 member English department to a content-specific questionnaire and videotapes of 12 English classes, representing a sample of all grades and tracks…

The main research hypothesis of this study stated that when the universal characteristics of language evaluation are applied to the written language of the students in four fifth grades of varying racial composition, no significant differences would be reported. Two instruments were used: a composition and a series of six paragraphs modified by a…