Three elementary demonstration-classes at San Fernando Valley State College were taught to perform a variety of sentence-building exercises demanding work with kernel sentences and their transforms. The primary class--a disadvantaged group--learned to manipulate questions, adjectives, and coordinating transformations. The third-fourth grade…

On the basis of a study of the language of 22 black children in a rural county of northern Florida, the author states that apart from geographical dialects, there are two "genera" of English: Black (BE) and White (WE). Within each of these genera there are two varieties: Educated and Uneducated. These are further defined by…

Based on transcribed conversations with black children in kindergarten and the intermediate grades, a study was devised to determine whether black urban children from lower socioeconomic areas speak a systematic, consistent form of nonstandard English, and if so, to provide a syntactical analysis of the dialect of nonstandard speakers. Speech…

There are problems in the field of English teaching on at least three levels: research, teacher training, and the students. Research in the teaching of English must be preceded by research in English, language variation, and native language acquisition and by further work in descriptive linguistics. A significant problem in current language…

Created as a manual primarily for use by average American middle-class teachers of inner-city children, this presentation of materials involves precise detailed examples of classroom activities, most of which are based on folk tales, folk games, and folk music from African-rooted traditions. The chapters contained in the book are: "All God's…

A case study approach is used to investigate written linguistic performance among black college freshmen from lower socio-economic and black nonstandard English (BNE) speaking backgrounds who are assigned to remedial-type English skills courses and generally assumed by their teachers and others to lack either or both competence or performance…

Sometimes descriptions of known facts about a language fail to be explanatory in a satisfying way, because they ignore parallelisms in related languages, including chronologically earlier stages of the same language. This article examines several Romance languages and dialects in terms of similarities in morphological evolutionary development.…

This study examines the usage of the auxiliaries "avoir" and "etre" in the passe compose and pluperfect. The study is primarily based on a sample of French written by agroup of grade 9 Franco-Ontarian pupils from the Sudbury region. The students' written French is shown to include a high proportion of cases where intransitive…

Several obstacles to social and intellectual growth confront the disadvantaged student whose nonstandard dialect is unacceptable to many users of standard English. To help him develop a bidialectalism that minimizes these obstacles, the English teacher needs to guide the student to explore the ways in which language conveys meaning; to experience…

This memorandum is a systematic listing and description of the salient features of English phonology and morphology, accompanied by a listing of parallel features in nonstandard dialects that account for the difficulties the speakers of nonstandard speech experience in the acquisition of standard English. The dialects considered are English as…

Fourteen papers collected under three headings--literature, language, and composition--consider what lies ahead in the teaching of elementary school English. Papers on literature cover the role of literature in elementary English programs (Alan S. Downer), the necessity for developing the student's imagination (James E. Miller, Jr.), the nature of…

Not all poor people live in cities, but as the problems of those who do are intensified by the urban press, the needs of the urban poor of all racial and cultural backgrounds deserve emphasis. The children of these poor are oriented to the physical and visual rather than to the aural. They are content-centered, problem-centered, externally…

This paper examines and evaluates 11 ERIC documents dealing with the manner and extent to which nonstandard dialects differ from standard English. The relative importance of each document to the issue is implicit in the comments concerning that article. The author presents and explains the deficit and difference models of explicating language…

Identifiable relational entities in the Auxiliary (Aux) structure of Nonstandard Negro English (NNE) enter into different sets of relationship from identifiable relational entities in the Aux structure of Standard English (SE). Specifically, there is an absence of "have + en" structures; there is no agreement between subjects and verbal forms…

Designed to interpret and synthesize the existing research and related information about dialects for those people who are involved in teaching a standard English to speakers of other dialects, the information in this report is based on an analysis and synthesis of over 1,250 articles and reports dealing with dialects and dialect learning. The…