Before teachers begin to teach Standard American English (SAE), the schools must strive for a greater tolerance among the public and the school community toward Non-Standard American English (NSAE) dialects. Through the use of a number of motivational approaches, students retain the right to their own dialects and language while learning SAE as a…

A study of the factors affecting the burring of word-initial /r/ in a small English village found variability in the temporal, spatial, social, sexual, and phonic aspects of usage. Six categories of burrers are distinguished according to their speech habits. The evidence points to an ongoing socially and phonetically conditioned change in the…

The goal of instruction in mainstream dialect (MD) acquisition should be to expand students' oral communication skills to include skills needed for academic and economic success, thereby making alternate dialect speakers bidialectic. This implies recognizing students' home dialect as a valid linguistic system and a part of their identity. Although…

The use of language in education is examined, and the ways in which recent research helps in the understanding of classroom language are explored. The relevance of such research to practicing teachers as well as to sociologists is also discussed. The volume is divided into nine chapters: (1) "Why Is Language Important in Education?"; (2)…

The conference reported here addressed the differences in learning writing among students who do not speak standard American English. In "Introduction to Black English," Robert Berdan notes the variability of Black dialect. Maryellen Garcia discusses the range of language abilities inherent in "Spanish-English Bilingualism in the…

Fourth-grade students (45 black and 45 white) were assigned to one of three groups defined by degree of teacher use of nonstandard English (standard English, moderate nonstandard English, or high nonstandard English). Each group was presented a lesson involving computing areas of rectangles and right triangles. After the lesson, each group was…

THE DATA PRESENTED IN THIS BOOK WERE GATHERED AS PART OF A PROJECT TO ANALYZE THE NON-STANDARD DIALECT OF ENGLISH SPOKEN BY NEGRO CHILDREN IN WASHINGTON, D.C. THE ULTIMATE AIM OF THE PROJECT IS TO PRODUCE THE BASIC LINGUISTIC INFORMATION ESSENTIAL TO PROGRAMS FOR TEACHING STANDARD ENGLISH TO THESE CHILDREN. THE TAPE RECORDINGS USED IN THIS STUDY…

The simplification of legal language is required by President Carter's Executive Order requiring "clear and simple English" in government regulations. A major problem in the simplification process is the absence of any adequate description or classification of legal language. This paper defines some specific features of legal language,…

Subjective judgments are useful in linguistic studies to supplement information from objective language data, enlarge our knowledge of public conceptions of social speech communities (such as Negro speech), provide techniques for discussion of social markedness of standard and nonstandard varieties of English, and provide techniques for…

The works cited on this extensively annotated bibliography represent approaches for understanding the language development of disadvantaged children. The subjects covered are bilingualism and dialectology, developmental influences (ethnic, family and home, instructional, and social and economic) and developmental status and processes (behavioral,…

This annotated bibliography provides information concerning audiovisual aids available for use in teaching and teacher training in language variation. A variety of topics are covered, including regional dialect studies, language change, language acquisition, social dialects, and language in education. Each entry includes the name of the product,…

Although there is a proliferation of educational programs aimed at improving language, there have been only meager attempts to produce measures for diagnostic and evaluative purposes. The project herein described is an attempt to devise a test that could be used: (1) to identify specific speech deviations of black ghetto students in order that…

A project in Washington, D.C., used classroom radio as a language arts tool to solve some of the classroom problems (i.e., lack of materials dealing with ghetto children, classroom discipline problems, and the inability of those unable to speak standard English to learn to read and write) which prevent disadvantaged, dialect-speaking children from…

The subjects in this study, 18 fifth- and sixth-grade students from a middle-class area, were asked to listen to a tape recording with excerpts of conversations by speakers of three dialects: middle-class white, lower-class white, and lower-class Negro. Subjects were asked to rate the personality of each speaker by voice cues alone. In addition,…

Developing test instruments for the Pattern Drills Program in the Pittsburg Public Schools has convinced the writer that the more test development activities and the teaching process reinforce each other, the stronger the program is. The Pattern Drills Program aims to develop bidialectism in non-standard English speakers by teaching standard…