Discusses some of the problems of the culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged student in learning to read and achieving academic success. Several suggestions are offered as solutions for these problems. (TO)

Composition teachers should recognize that all errors in student writing are not the same. The author distinguishes between handbook rules, spoken language, and ambiguity. (MM)

Explores how a speech variety close to oratorical standard English is learned in one Afro-American peasant community in the West Indies. Material gathered during two field trips, one supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and the other by a National Institute of Mental Health grant. (VM)

Paper presented at the TESOL Convention, February 26, 1972, in Washington, D.C. (VM)

Asks Mrs. Seymour, a former teacher currently working as an editorial specialist in linguistics for an educational publisher, to comment on the standard/nonstandard dialect controversy as it relates to beginning reading instruction. (VJ)

Research is reported on the degree to which the speaker characteristics of children can be related to the attitudes of teachers, in the absence, and in the presence of additional visual information about the speaker. (JM)

Black English-Negro Nonstandard English, or Negro dialect,"-although perhaps represented by less divergent varieties in the Northern cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is here shown to have been there all along. (JM)

Illustrates the difficulty encountered when disadvantaged black children are taught reading by conventional methods--by identifying some conflict points between nonstandard Negro dialect and Standard English. These cause no problem if they are simply disregarded in the teaching of reading. (JM)

Paper read at the National Council of Teachers of English meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 28, 1970. (DS)

Paper presented at the TESOL Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 1971.(VM)

Takes issue with the widely-held notion that urban black children are verbally deprived. Slightly revised version of a paper presented, in part, at the Georgetown University 20th Round Table, Washington, D.C., March 1969. Appears in "The Florida FL Reporter special anthology issue, "Linguistic-Cultural Differences and American Education. (FWB)