This book offers direction for the teacher who wants to know what can be done to improve the effectiveness of language and reading instruction. Part 1 focuses on the issues in teaching black children to read and provides the teacher with an orientation to some of the specific problems in the field such as the question of the existence and nature…

An attempt to fill the gap between the purely theoretical and the purely practical, this book provides the classroom teacher with a set of principles for using linguistics in devising and evaluating teaching techniques. Briefly, the chapters (1) present some special learning principles that distinguish language learning from other types of…

This study discusses methods for integrating aural-oral instruction in grammar and usage within the total program of junior and senior high school English. The fundamental purpose of this method is to teach students speaking nonstandard English dialects the why, how, and when of using a second dialect. The study discusses (1) a definition of…

As part of the development of a test battery to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, a test was devised consisting of a repetition task. Fifteen sentences in black standard and 15 in black nonstandard English were to be repeated. A black experimenter administered the test individually to 35 black kindergartners. The…

Evidence seems to suggest that children whose dialects are nonstandard generally produce compositions considered lower in quality than those produced by middle and upper-middle class children. The focus of this study, therefore, was to examine the relationship between children's knowledge of the structure of their language and their judged ability…

In order to discover the linguistic competence of Hawaiian kindergarten children, tape recordings of their speech were collected, both openly and surreptitiously, in a wide variety of circumstances, including at home, at play, at school, and in formal situations. An analysis of the data reveals that the children command a wide range of linguistic…

Recent findings in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics indicate that the primary aim of oral language instruction for speakers of nonstandard English should be to help students translate their latent English competence into effective performance in a wide range of styles and modes, rather than merely to teach forms of standard English. One…

Over a 10-year period, the oral language development of 338 pupils was studied from kindergarten through grade 9 to establish the most crucial and frequent oral language difficulties. Recorded samples of oral English from each subject were segmented by oral intonation patterns and syntactic units, and were analyzed yearly in terms of 21 oral…

Equally divided by sex, grade level, and socioeconomic status, 360 subjects were used in two major experiments. Experiment 1 (Sentence Recall) attempted to answer three questions: (1) What are some of the developmental differences between standard and nonstandard speech? (2) To what extent are these differences sex and social class bound? (3) To…

Comparative research indicates that almost without exception, late eighteenth century non-standard English pronunciation was very close to what is called Broad Australian. Present Australian English is closely akin to the blended, popular colloquial London English, spoken by the largest group of Australia's first settlers. This pronunciation…

This paper discusses the role of both the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) within the fields of English as a second or foreign language, English as a second dialect, and bilingual education. The relationship between the two organizations and the interests, structures, and…

In a study of Negro children's listening comprehension, conducted in 1969, the following hypotheses were tested: (1) Beginning first-grade Negro dialect speakers who scored high, average, and low on readiness tests show no significant differences in their ability to answer literal comprehension questions about stories presented orally in standard…

Students and teachers, black and white, need to be familiarized with some of the significant linguistic and cultural differences between blacks and whites. (JH)

It is through continued exposure that Black students can learn the principles of the written language. How well these students understand and apply such principles depends on what objectives are set, what materials and strategies are used, and what classroom environment is created by the teacher. (Author/RK)