Chicano English, spoken by many Chicanos and some Anglos, is an ethnic variety of English that serves as a marker of social identity, and it has specific linguistic parameters. It is similar to standard English, and often exists alongside interference English, spoken by Spanish-speakers beginning to learn English. Research supports the argument…

The great majority of poor readers in urban schools are members of an ethnic minority, a low social class, and a poor family. The simple recognition of these factors, however, is of no help in characterizing the specific sources of language norms among urban minority students or in determining the ways these distinctive norms interfere with…

Language development and dialect are measures of influences upon a student's ability to learn to read. It has been observed that students whose language differs from that used in schools and in the materials of instruction are often found in remedial reading classes. Their difficulty lies in attempting to learn to read a language which is…

An understanding of dialect differences goes beyond the recognition that people talk differently; it concerns the way dialects differentiate themselves, the main differences in the patterns, and the method of discovering the patterns of various dialects. This booklet is intended for those who need to know more specific information concerning the…

Many Puerto Rican children currently enrolled in English as a second language (ESL) classes speak Puerto Rican English (PRE). Their speech is characterized by nonstandard features, including some from Black English. Because of actual or historical interference from Spanish, they do qualify for ESL enrollment, yet their language problems are…

Because many urban youth have grown up in communities where only nonstandard English is spoken, and because schools lack programming to teach standard English, these youth frequently graduate from high school without acquiring communication skills necessary for professional careers. Prospective employers tend to associate certain dialects with…

To dispel the myths of linguistic deficiency among nonstandard English dialect speakers, evidence that repudiates these myths should be examined. These myths include suggestions that nonstandard dialects are ungrammatical and cannot be used to form concepts, and that speakers of such dialects receive little verbal stimulation as children. The…

This monograph deals with one of the most difficult problems facing the schools--the language patterns which mark one social class from another. The "Cautionary Foreword" points out that teachers have long tried to "correct" the speech of students whose dialects were nonstandard, without much sense of how language is learned or…

Yugoslavia, a country with a population of about 20,000,000, has as official languages Macedonian, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian. The latter is the cause of much controversy, for while Croatian and Serbian indisputably have a common linguistic base, the political and economic tensions between the two "nationalities" augment disagreement…

A china factory in Pennsylvania was the setting for a study of the characteristics of the factory, its workers, and the community. Specifically, the speech of 151 informants, representing 12 1/2% of the plant population, was analyzed for both careful and casual speech, in order to focus on lexical and grammatical forms which reflect regional and…

This discussion begins with a brief description of three approaches to teaching standard Spanish as a second dialect (S.S.S.D.), called the "eradication" approach, the "second dialect" approach, and the "both dialects" approach, which is favored here. Because the teacher of standard Spanish as a second dialect is…

Navaho Indians learning English tend to use two versions of the language: classroom English and an informal dialect spoken outside school. The sounds of Navaho are imposed on spoken English, and the phonological deviations produce morphological and syntactical errors. Mistakes in verb tense and in singular and plural suffixes are common. The value…

Samples of taped readings recorded by a black and a white speaker, each reading the identical two stories, were played to four groups of white teachers, 87 in number. The latter were asked to evaluate certain characteristics of the speakers, using an adjective checklist and multiple choice questions. Results indicated that the black speaker and…

This study examines the pronunciation characteristics of Negro and white children from different socio-economic classes in Gainesville, Florida. As expected, there are significant differences between the white and Negro children. However, all of the Negroes and the higher whites produce both "General American" and "Southern" dialect…

This study attempted to determine the extent to which phonemic-graphemic correspondence problems adversely affect reading comprehension among black children who are nonstandard speakers of English. An instrument requiring both silent and oral reading was devised by the investigator to test the effects of phonemic-graphemic correspondence problems…