The number of minority children who are placed in special education programs is disproportionate to the number of minority children in school. One factor causing this situation is that dialect interference causes lower reading scores among minority children. Since few standardized tests instruct the teacher to ignore errors attributable to…

Problems in educating children of minority cultures are examined with particular application to Australian Aboriginal children. Three models (the remedial, the supplementary, and the instrumental) for educating culturally different children are contrasted, with the instrumental model (in which the content and techniques of the school are used to…

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE PROJECTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN ARE DESCRIBED IN THE SECOND ISSUE OF THE INVENTORY OF PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES IN READING AND ENGLISH, MAY 1967. SIX TYPES OF RESEARCH AND APPLICATION ACTIVITIES ARE INCLUDED--(1) ACTION PROGRAMS EXPLOITING ADVANCES IN LINGUISTIC SCIENCE AND RELATED FIELDS, (2) PROJECTS AND…

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 paper relates linguistic theory and bidialectalism, synthesizes theory and research concerning bidialectalism, and presents suggestions for a curriculum designed to maximize students' self-conscious control over their speech. Instructional activities, which have standard English as their goal, include pattern drills, short memorized dramas,…

This paper discusses some of the problems faced in working with competing theories of basic writing and suggests its own kind of theoretical analysis of nonstandard writing. A brief overview of basic writing theories is presented, and the theories are categorized into two approaches: a traditional approach of teaching by prescription in an…

This study attempted to assess the linguistic competence of black lower-class speakers within each of two language systems: standard English and Black English. The subjects were 72 black kindergarten, third-, and sixth-graders in a predominantly black community in Toledo, Ohio. All children attending the school were considered lower-class, since…

Knowledge about how language works is often considered superfluous by the public. In general, the public image of language is that language is in a serious decline and that outside influences on language have led it astray, views that are supported by false assumptions about language on the part of writers. Writers in newspapers and magazines note…

The value of teaching Standard English as the language of school and mainstream middle class culture is undisputed, yet Black English, as a non-standard English dialect, has great potential as an instructional tool in the composition classroom. The use of the black dialect can help expand black students' intellectual potential by de-stigmatizing…

This paper examines the language used by workers in a china factory in order to present the characteristics and underlying features of occupational jargon. The paper shows: (1) jargon is affected by regional-local pronunciation, grammatical expressions and lexical items, and by individual speech styles which result from general linguistic…

The first section of this paper is a general discussion of standard English. The nine sections which follow discuss the concept of correctness and the ideological differences between grammarians and purists; standard English in a historical perspective; Eric Partridge's (1969) taxonomy of the degrees and kinds of standard English, including…

The introduction to this teaching module states that mounting research evidence supports the linguistic and academic benefits of early instruction through the vernacular, based on the premise that non-English speaking students who learn to read in the vernacular (and accelerate their conceptual development in their mother tongue as they learn…

During the past fifteen years, a variety of linguistic analyses of the tense and aspect systems of dialects of English has been conducted. These analyses were bounded by several analytic dimensions. This paper treats three of these dimensions and discusses their interrelationships and implications in relation to two dialects--Black English and…

This paper argues that Mexican-American bilinguals are in danger of becoming victims of a double-deficit theory, i.e., they are erroneously considered by some to be deficient in both their languages. An article by Joseph H. Matluck and Betty J. Mace that takes the double-deficit viewpoint is refuted as being damaging to Mexican-American children.…

Goodman's hypothesis, that the task of learning to read is made more difficult as the divergence between the dialect of the learner and that of the material increases, raises three questions considered by the author to be central to the dialect/reading issue. The first asks what influence dialect has on acquiring reading ability; the second asks…