A case study approach is used to investigate written linguistic performance among black college freshmen from lower socio-economic and black nonstandard English (BNE) speaking backgrounds who are assigned to remedial-type English skills courses and generally assumed by their teachers and others to lack either or both competence or performance ability in Standard English (SE). This study offers an alternative explanation which postulates bidialectal competence and accounts for nonstandard performance (particularly in writing) through a psycho-cultural hypothesis. This hypothesis postulates functional interference because of the operation of certain attitudinal and motivational constraints on black students' production of SE. Case studies of six randomly selected students from a list of freshmen assigned to remedial English classes in a predominately black Southern college were employed. The findings revealed that the hypothesized psycho-cultural barriers to the students' SE written performance did not appear to operate significantly in the classroom writing of the six case study students. (Author/RB)