Before teachers can decide how to teach writing to nonstandard dialect speakers, they should determine whether college students can in fact learn to command a second dialect (in this case, Standard English), as well as the most effective way to provide access to command of Standard English while educating the public about the values of nonstandard…

Many students, especially nontraditional ones, are not ready for conventional instruction in composition because their problems with the medium overwhelm the content of their writing. There are two different needs for composition students: composing (content) and editing (correctness), which need to be taught in a two-step process. Composing can…

A report is given of an investigation examining the influence of student dialect and ethnicity on teachers' expectations of academic performance. The subjects of the study were secondary level teaching candidates enrolled in a generic methods course comprised of ethnically mixed learners. A control group of the teachers was given a course in…

Research conducted to refine and perfect a theory and model of the reading process is presented in this report. Specifically, studies of the reading miscues of 96 students who were either speakers of English as a second language or of stable, rural dialects are detailed. Chapters deal with the following topics: methodology, the reading process,…

IT HAS BEEN HYPOTHESIZED THAT THE ADOPTION OF THE LINGUISTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUBCULTURE OTHER THAN A CHILD'S OWN IS A VALID INDICATION OF THE DEGREE TO WHICH THE CHILD HAS BECOME SOCIALIZED INTO THAT SUBCULTURE. TO EXAMINE THIS HYPOTHESIS, RESEARCH WAS CONDUCTED (1) TO EXPLORE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LINGUISTIC HABITS AND ATTITUDE…

In this paper, the author (1) weighs the educational value of an oral language program which attempts to teach standard dialect to speakers of a nonstandard dialect and (2) considers the probable success of such a program, given the present social trends. He voices the following objections: (a) teaching a speaker of nonstandard dialect the…

The language the Negro child brings with him to school has a linguistic structure which is clearly distinguishable from that of standard English. His language is not a defective form of speech. There is, however, what Labov calls, "reciprocal ignorance," a mutual lack of comprehension for the other's language system. Writing is a secondary symbol…

This volume is a report of the methodology employed by the Detroit Dialect Study staff in their survey of Detroit speech, 1966-67. As a study of one approach to sociolinguistic fieldwork, this report is descriptive rather than theoretical "in order to provide a practical basis for large-scale urban language study." The authors discuss…

Every child entering elementary school has acquired an adequate control of the basic structures of some language system. The English teacher must tailor his goals and methods to exploit this competence. The basic linguistic system which has been internalized by children who speak non-standard English is different enough from standard English to…

This annotated bibliography of recent studies on language variation presents abstracts which appeared in "Resources in Education" during the period September 1973 through December 1974. They include entries from several of the ERIC clearinghouses: Adult Education, Reading and Communication Skills, Languages and Linguistics, Early…

The term "Regional Standard English" should refer to any kind of English spoken by educated individuals in a particular region. Vernacular is spoken by individuals with little education. Sociolinguistics as a field embraces ethnography of communication, social coding, societal analysis, social-psychological analysis and anthropoloty, all…

The aim of the research reported here was to describe dialect diversity in Appalachia (Monroe and Mercer Counties, West Virginia) and to examine the possible effect of this diversity on education. The present volume contains the first two parts of the report, the third being submitted separately. The first part includes chapters 1-5, the second…

This study investigated the effect of two social dialects, Black English (BE) and standard English (SE), and word frequency on performance in blending and word recognition. The subjects were 60 second-grade children from three ethnic groups: 20 white SE speaking children, 20 black BE speaking children, and 20 black SE speaking children. The…

This bibliography is designed to be used by teachers who need some background in the nature of "social dialects," who wish to keep abreast of the results of recent research in sociolinguistics, and who are looking for materials for use in the classroom. The emphasis of this bibliography is on Black English (BE) as compared with "Standard American"…

Twenty girls were selected out of 110 enrolled in tenth-grade typing classes at San Bernardino High School for the two-semester experimental Business Speech program described in this report. In addition to taped language laboratory lessons on grammatical and syntactical items in standard English contrasted with nonstandard Negro English,…