As part of the development of a battery of tests to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, a test, consisting of 20 items involving verbal and pictorial cues, was developed and administered to 27 third graders and 32 sixth graders. Results were analyzed to determine test reliability and correlation with other test scores.…

The second phase of a three-part research and development plan, this study investigated the relationship between teacher performance on the Black English Tests for Teachers (TTBE) and specified sets of teacher behaviors and pupil achievement as measured by curriculum-specific tests in language arts. The study involved 27 teachers from two schools…

As part of the development of a test battery to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, a test was devised consisting of a repetition task. Fifteen sentences in black standard and 15 in black nonstandard English were to be repeated. A black experimenter administered the test individually to 35 black kindergartners. The…

This memorandum is a systematic listing and description of the salient features of English phonology and morphology, accompanied by a listing of parallel features in nonstandard dialects that account for the difficulties the speakers of nonstandard speech experience in the acquisition of standard English. The dialects considered are English as…

This experiment deals with a test of auditory discrimination between standard Black English and nonstandard Black English. The test consists of two sections, one emphasizing phonological variables and the other emphasizing grammatical variables. It was administered to 83 black and 71 white children who were second, fourth, and sixth graders in…

As part of the development of a battery of tests to determine proficiency in black standard and nonstandard speech, the authors developed a two-part test consisting of 20 items designed to evoke a response by means of verbal and pictorial cues. Each cue was supposed to elicit a specific grammatical construction characteristic of either black…

A study was undertaken to confirm previous findings on the relation between teacher performance on the "Teacher Test of Black English" (TTBE), certain teaching behaviors (direct correction, establishing a set, and "directly relevant" teaching), and the achievement of Vernacular Black English speaking students. In addition, the study sought to…

The experiment reported on in this paper investigated primarily the overall effectiveness in raising the language achievement of black children of the pattern practice approach and the use of overall contrasts between standard and nonstandard dialects within the pattern practice approach. The experiment was conducted in three third-grade and three…

The SCRDT Black English Tests for Teachers, a battery consisting of the Reading Pedagogy (RP) and History and Structure of Black English (HSBE) tests, was field tested to determine reliability of the tests; their intercorrelations; the relation of teacher characteristics (sex, age, place of birth, ethnicity, years of experience, attitudes, etc.)…

This memorandum is the third in a series of publications which will ultimately combine to form the basis of a "Syllabus for the Training of Teachers of Standard English as a Second Dialect." Most of the culturally and economically disadvantaged are not native speakers of standard English, but speakers of a nonstandard dialect. The syllabus is…

The main purpose of this study is to measure the attitudes of teachers toward speech varieties used by speakers of Black English and to determine whether there is any evidence that those attitudes are linked to pupils' classroom performance in reading. Also investigating is whether exposure to information about and experience with varieties of…