This issue has four articles. Maria del Pilar Garcia Mayo and Teresa Pica in "Is the EFL Environment a Language Learning Environment?" address the question of whether the English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom is an environment that promotes input, feedback, and the production of output that is necessary for successful second…

Studies the writing achievement of 28 11-year olds attending an urban Newcastle upon Tyne (England) school and their ability to conform to standard English writing conventions. Finds the influence of a nonstandard dialect (Tyneside) to be minor. Observes writing difficulties are frequently related to mastering the writing system itself rather than…

To examine some of the linguistic aspects of Chicano English (a variety of English commonly spoken by Mexican American bilinguals in the Southwest) which present problems in the acquisition of written Standard English, sample writings were collected from 15 University of Texas-El Paso students enrolled in an English as a Second Language course. To…

Dialect writing in nineteenth-century America has been used as a source of evidence about popular American language and culture. Works employing dialect have been studied as documents embodying perceptions of the relation between character, role, and moral values on the one hand, and speech variety on the other. Critics have noticed the difference…

This study challenges the Toukamaa and Skutnabb-Kangas theory of semilingualism and suggests that an integrated set of sociological and sociolinguistic factors can predict the performance of minority bilinguals in school. Semilingualism is described as a low level of competence in the minority language, a linguistic handicap that prevents the…

This study describes the syntactic features of Black English Vernacular (BEV) spoken by black characters in three black situation comedies on American television: "The Jeffersons,""Good Times," and "What's Happening." Using scripts and audio tapes of three episodes from each series during the 1977-78 television season, transcripts were made of…

The purpose of the study reported here was: (1) to determine whether any predictable relationships exist between the spoken language patterns of individuals and those individuals' ethnic attitudes; and (2) to identify the degree of association present among various selected demographic factors, language patterns, and ethnic attitudes. The…

This fourth book in the Urban Language Series is concerned with the relationship of language to reading. Literacy must be based on the language the child actually uses. In the case of ghetto children, materials in their dialect must be prepared so that their task of associating sounds and words with written symbols is not complicated by lack of…

This volume is a collection of articles which are concerned with the field of applied linguistics. Part One, "Language and Linguistics," includes two articles: "Language" and "The Relevance of Linguistics." Part Two, "Linguistics and Spelling," consists of one article, "Sounds and Spellings; Spellings and Sounds." Part Three, "Linguistics and…

What has been labelled mainstream dialectology has been criticized soundly on theoretical grounds, yet mainstream dialectologists have responded with the assertion that their critics have not been intimately familiar with dialect methodology and are therefore not qualified to criticize. Claiming that while theoretical issues are far from being…

This handbook outlines the curriculum objectives for the children's television program, "The Electric Company." The first portion of the text delineates strategies for teaching symbol/sound analysis, including units on blends, letter groups, and word structure. A second section addresses strategies for reading for meaning, including…

Appraised objectively in this article is a 3-year research project that involved experimentation with audiolingual methods in teaching standard English in Freshman English classes at Chaflin College in South Carolina to Negro students who spoke a nonstandard dialect. Prior to a discussion of the effectiveness of using spelling instruction to teach…

Language arts teaching is supposed to be based on the principle of starting where the child is and communicating to him through channels which he has at that point, in language which is familiar to him, and with illustrative concepts with which he is familiar. Beginning materials in this area, however, have made only minor strides to this goal and…

The effect of processing information in standard and nonstandard English was investigated using an equivalent standard and nonstandard English passage as the stimulus. Eight literal and eight inferential questions derived from the passage were used as the index of comprehension. Two hundred Black students were randomly assigned by class to one of…

This volume contains an edited version of the papers presented at a 1969 conference called by the Center for Applied Linguistics in an effort to provide information to researchers, teachers, and administrators from various fields who have seen social dialects as contributing to the complexity of their disciplines. Ten scholars represented the…