The impact of bilingual/bicultural instruction on English education could be a lessening of low success, undifferentiated teaching. The demand for accommodation of cultural pluralism in the classroom could result in training practices and attitudinal growth that will produce the kind of positive individualization in school practice that will…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO TEST THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A PROGRAM UTILIZING TAPE RECORDED RESPONSIVE LESSONS TO HELP URBAN PRIMARY CHILDREN DEVELOP A STANDARD ENGLISH DIALECT. AN EXPERIMENTAL GROUP OF 36 CHILDREN HEARD AND RECITED 8- TO 10-MINUTE TAPES OF POEMS, SONGS, AND SPEECH GAMES, WHILE 36 CHILDREN IN A CONTROL GROUP WERE INSTRUCTED IN…

THE SCIENCE OF LINGUISTICS CAN, IF INTELLIGENTLY APPLIED, AID THE TEACHER OF ENGLISH IN CONVINCING STUDENTS THAT LANGUAGE IS A MEDIUM THEY CAN CONTROL BY LEARNING ABOUT ITS STRUCTURE. KNOWLEDGE OF THE PROCESSES BY WHICH CHILDREN LEARN LANGUAGE WILL LEAD ENGLISH TEACHERS TO RECOGNIZE THE STRENGTH OF BEHAVIOR PATTERNS IN USAGE AND NONSTANDARD…

In the first phase of this study, a graduate class in social dialects was divided into four groups. The experimental group was exposed to a detailed transformational analysis of standard and black English. They were administered a language attitude survey and completed a self-evaluation of their ability to teach effectively speakers of black…

Forty-eight black seventh-grade pupils participated in a study to test the assumption that the previously learned dialect of black inner-city pupils interferes with reading achievement. Standardized reading achievement test scores were used to classify the students in three groups representing three levels of reading proficiency. Speech variables…

The first report in this research monograph, "Black English as an Instructional Tool for Teaching Arithmetic," states that black elementary school students in a suburban school improved in ability to do math problems after a 6-week program in which Black English and easier-to-read words were used in the problems. At the same time, a control group…

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…

Although the middle class child may come to school with a fairly large and useful vocabulary, teachers must be concerned with the extension of that vocabulary beyond its present limits. While the language of the middle class child is probably not an important concern in the choice of reading methods or the selection of word lists, it does have…

The purposes of this study were to redefine, through further experimentation, previously developed instruments measuring bidialectal proficiency; to measure any possible developmental trends in bidialectal proficiency; and to establish the relation of proficiency in black standard English (BSE) and black nonstandard English (BNSE) to other…

To develop positive speech patterns in disadvantaged students, the More Effective Schools Program in New York City instigated an experimental speech improvement program, K-6, in 20 of its elementary schools. Three typical speech-related problems of the disadvantaged--lack of school "know-how," inability to verbalize well, and the presence of poor…

Teachers with training in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) are often called upon to participate in programs to teach a standard English dialect to speakers of non-standard dialects ("dialect expansion"). A course outline is presented here which should respond to the needs of four groups: (1) college professors who recognize…

The phenomenon of "cross-code ambiguity" is offered as one explanation of the persistence of such Negro Nonstandard English (NNE) sentences as "The man he did it." In NNE the string "The man did it" is felt to be ambiguous, referring to either "The man who did it..." or, as in Standard English (SE), "The man did it." The use here of the pleonastic…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

This study examined whether dialect background interferes with the comprehension of school material due to structural and phonological differences and whether reading or listening is a more efficient mode for presentation of school material. The population of 304 black male adolescents was randomly assigned to four groups, and seven passages of…

This study explored whether statistically significant differences exist between the (1) grammatical structures produced by high, average, and low black, inner-city elementary readers as measured by a language competency task; and (2) whether statistically significant interactions occur between reading achievement levels and the age of the child,…