This study extended the study of specific language impairments (SLI) to two non-mainstream dialects: a rural version of Southern African American English and a rural version of Southern White English using language samples from 93 4- to 6-year-olds in Louisiana. Findings indicated the surface characteristics of SLI manifested in the two dialects…

Mauritius is a multilingual postcolonial island of the Indian Ocean. Although the French-lexified creole, Mauritian Creole/Kreol, is the native language of 70% of the Mauritian population, it is excluded from the education system. Kreol lacks prestige because it is seen as broken French and associated with the local Creoles, a socioeconomically…

This 65-item bibliography presents newspaper articles, books, magazine articles, articles from scholarly journals, and documents available online that deal with Black English (Ebonics). Materials in the bibliography were published between 1973 and 1997, with many items published in 1996 or 1997. (RS)

Dialectically different students can more easily be taught expository writing and reading skills if the teacher approaches the students' language and culture with a positive attitude, makes use of the students' cultural experiences, and selects reading materials with which students can relate to. (EH)

Defines black dialect and traces its history; explores the myths of the linguistically underdeveloped black child; discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of black dialect and its relation to teaching black children to read; summarizes some of the implications for teacher attitudes and our educational system as a whole. (EH)

In the early 1940's, a group of Mexican American youths called Pachucos emerged in the United States. This paper discusses the attitudes of some writers of the time and their creation of a criminal stereotype of the Pachuco, his origins, the racial basis of the zoot-suit riots, and the basic origin and composition of his slang, Calo. (Author/NQ)

Students have a right to use the dialect and language of their own cultural heritage. Language and dialect rights have many advantages for the user, including prestige, self-confidence, group identity, opportunity to project personality and style, appreciation and respect of cultural heritage, and self-awareness. All dialects are equal and are…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the grammatical features of their dialect on the reading comprehension of speakers of a black nonstandard dialect of English. Subjects were 119 fifth grade speakers of black English (BE) in 13 classes in three semirural school districts of a southern state. An oral test in standard English…

This monograph on Gowda Kannada presents a description of the phonology, morphophonemics, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, interjections, noun derivations, verbs, clitics, and verb stem alternants. The author, in the Introduction and throughout the work, has pointed out some of the important differences between this dialect of Kannada and…

Views from different disciplines and within different disciplines often come into sharp conflict with one another about the speech of lower socio-economic class Negroes. Furthermore, some current views of Black English have challenged basic linguistic and sociolinguistic premises about the nature of language. It is therefore the purpose of this…

Two purposes guided this study: (1) to investigate the effects of modeling on the verbalizations of lower-class, black, preschool children; and (2) to investigate the relationships between the dialect employed by the model and children's language production. As subjects, 72 black, preschool children in lower-class neighborhood day care centers of…

The purposes of this paper are: (1) to illustrate the nature of the difficulty when disadvantaged black children are taught reading by conventional methods; (2) to show that the conflict points, specifically, the phonological conflict points, need not be a problem if they are simply disregarded; and (3) to argue that disadvantaged black children…

The purpose of this essay is to suggest one area of study, the functional nature of social dialects, and certain principles of anthropology as they are applied to social and cultural change, which may prove of some use to the teacher. There are essentially three pragmatic functions of language in communicative interaction: manipulative,…