This report is an overview of the most frequently recurring grammatical structures in the speech of ten-year-old to twelve-year-old black children from lower socioeconomic neighborhoods in Baltimore. The speech sample consists of three types of speech situations: playing games with peers, talking with an older white interviewer, and telling…

This paper discusses the treatment of minority group children in the public schools. Noting that the school's approach to the child's first language may determine where the child is "afforded great opportunity or faced with formidable problems," the author states: "The opportunity comes when the school works to build upon and…

This document describes a four-year program designed to develop and test a method for teaching standard English to nonstandard dialect speakers in the first four grades of elementary school in Hilo, Hawaii. Chapters in this first volume are (1) Introduction, (2) Project Site and Evaluation Strategy, (3) Instrumentation, (4) Development of Lesson…

Designed as a diagnostic tool for assisting early childhood and kindergarten teachers, the Sentence Repetition Task seeks to distinguish children who speak a different dialect and are normal in language development from children who speak a different dialect and are developmentally delayed. This technique is based on the work of Menyuk (1964),…

Syntactical rule differences in black dialect that can be more helpful to young adolescents' perceptions than the corresponding rules in standard English were studied. The syntactical rule in black dialect that was identified as being more explicit than the corresponding rule in standard English was the invariant "be" verb form (as in…

Conformity to Standard English, ethnic background, socioeconomic status (SES), and modes of presentation were investigated to determine the influence of these four factors on reading comprehension among fifth graders. Homogeneous groups within four experimental categories were formulated: middle SES white students, low SES white students, middle…

This bulletin reports on condensations of tape-recorded lectures and discussions from a workshop which trained a nucleus of Baltimore City Public School personnel in new approaches to the study of the English language. Designed to serve as an orientation, it is made up of six major sections: (1) Charlton Laird discusses the history, nature, and…

This study supports the hypothesis that educated white listeners react negatively to the phonological variations of non-standard English. White college freshmen and seniors listened to a recorded tape of ten speakers, black and white with standard and non-standard styles of pronunciation, all reading the same passage. Students were asked to judge…

The need for preparing materials which are comprehensible to disadvantaged children led to this study in which verbs were simplified in an effort to determine whether such simplification might increase the likelihood of passages being understood by disadvantaged black students. The hypothesis was based on a 1927 study which found that 18 verbs,…

This section of a four-part research project investigating the syntax of Brazilian Portuguese presents data concerning tense usage in verb distribution. The data are derived from the analysis of selected literary samples from representative and contemporary writers. The selection of authors and tabulation of data are also described. Materials…

Two studies are discussed in this research report, which was presented at the 1973 American Educational Research Association meeting. The first study investigated whether black children would evaluate Black English selections more favorably than standard English selections and whether favorable evaluation would lead to greater comprehension of the…

Thirty essays on language and communication in their contemporary social contexts are brought together in this volume which differs significantly from other language readers in that it (1) treats only those aspects of the subjects that have demonstrated their appeal to a wide range of students, (2) emphasizes their social and cultural…

Recent studies suggest that the language deficiency often attributed to disadvantaged children, especially disadvantaged black children, is not a language deficit so much as a difficulty in dialect switching. The disadvantaged child's language patterns are different from the language patterns of the child from the mainstream of American society. A…

The sociolinguistic variation of speech among Detroit Negroes is described. The analysis is based on the speech of 48 Negro informants, evenly distributed in four social classes. In addition, 12 upper-middle class whites are included. The social variables investigated in relation to speech differences are class, style, sex, age, and racial…

This paper is divided into the following five sections, each of which considers an aspect of teaching grammar: the importance of teaching English grammar, teaching the patterns of words and sentences, the functions of words, making sentences, and a curriculum proposal for teaching standard English in the elementary grades through high school. (LL)