Describes issues which emerged when undergraduates implemented a preventively oriented educational program for disadvantaged children. Undergraduates unwittingly imposed standard English and inculcated mainstream cultural norms. Efforts were made to identify and resolve these problems to support and strengthen the children's traditions, values and…

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…

This book teaches the Arabic Lebanese dialect through topics such as food, clothing, transportation, and leisure activities. It also provides background material on the Arab World in general and the region where Lebanese Arabic is spoken or understood--Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine--in particular. This language guide is based on the phonetic…

Describes the experiences of an itinerant ESL/D resource teacher from the Peel Board (Canada) who has covered, over several years, a large number of K-8 and K-13 schools. Discusses problems encountered and offers guidelines for helping minority group students and establishing good relationships with school staffs. (MES)

Describes specific training, using taped readings, designed to prepare teachers to accurately assess the oral reading of students who exhibit dialect or second language influences in their speech. (MKM)

Language samples were elicited from 17 African American preschoolers by 3 examiners; a white female using standard English and 2 African American females using either standard English or black English. Samples elicited by the African American examiners contained more different Black English features, with examiner usage of Black English eliciting…

Describes the model of assimilation of native Mexican peoples to the broader mainstream. Bilingual education (BE), long used as a tool to facilitate language shift, is examined in the light of the superimposed discourse on national identity and nationalism. It is concluded that the demands of the Amerindians have been placated through the politics…

Explores the implications of requirements in England's National Curriculum for English to develop students' ability to write standard English. Examines the use of nonstandard dialect grammar in students' writing. Finds that similar dialectical constructs are used in four regions and that they are used more frequently in speech than in writing.…

The relationship between the frequency of African-American English (AAE) features used by African-American adolescent males (n = 16) and their performance on the seven clusters comprising the "Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised" (WLPB-R) was investigated. All participants were between the ages of 15 and 19 years who had a…

Purpose: The current study focuses on describing the English language narrative skills of children who have been exposed to the Filipino language. Method: Eight children between the ages of 6;0 (years;months) and 7;7 who spoke primarily English but who were exposed to the Filipino language at home participated. Each child produced three narrative…

From the perspective of an African American woman teaching at an all-Black high school in the Mississippi Delta, the moment when she must begin teaching English grammar is the moment her students put up a fearful, sometimes hostile resistance. This paper examines the language patterns and attitudes of African Americans, as well as the educational…

Foreign Workers' German (FWG) refers to the acquired German language skills of workers from various countries who were recruited to West Germany between 1955 and 1973 to fill menial, undesirable jobs. Contact between these workers and native German speakers was limited because of the nature of the foreigners' work, the tendency toward residential…

Noting that using correct verb forms is a problem for many elementary school students, and especially for those who are speakers of nonstandard English, this paper presents an instructional program for teaching past and past participle verb forms in writing to students in grade 3 through 6. The paper outlines the content of the instructional…

One of the central problems in teaching dialectally divergent students to read is the teacher's own lack of awareness of the nature of dialects. Teachers with some linguistics background will be more sensitive to language variation, and will therefore be better able to recognize divergent dialects and to separate learning problems relating to…

The stated intent of this book is to "contribute to the development of more socially aware and more linguistically oriented classroom teachers and to provide these teachers with methods for implementing their new awareness." Four sections provide chapters that discuss various aspects of the phenomenon of dialect clash. A historical…