Paper presented at 3rd Annual TESOL Convention, Chicago, Illinois, March 5-8, 1969.

The first section of this report consists of papers given at the two-day conference on social dialects at the Center for Applied Linguistics, October 1969: (1) "Social Dialects and the Field of Speech" by F. Williams, with response by O. Taylor; (2) "Approaches to Social Dialects in Early Childhood Education" by C. B. Cazden, with response by R.…

A recent study of 30 urban teachers showed that they were not only unable to give a precise description of their students' speech, but had no idea of how to go about making a description. Their ideas on vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation were formed by popular folk-lore rather than linguistic knowledge. Current teacher training programs are…

In this paper the author provides a brief overview of some of the ways in which recent sociolinguistic research is contributing to our knowledge of language teaching. The focus is on the American urban situation, especially as it relates to poor black children. One of the greatest deterrents to describing such situation has been our lack of tools…

This document comprises the final report of the Detroit Dialect Study (see also AL 001 422 and AL 001 419). In order to contrast the speech patterns of various socio-economic groups, the research design included--(1) randomly selecting approximately 700 Detroit residents of four major age groups from an enumerated population providing as few…