Analysis of essays by Black students in an urban community college demonstrates that some errors in adult Black students' writing cannot be analyzed merely within the traditional hierarchy of rules for writing. Consideration of sociological factors is germane to an evaluation of students' writing ability. (BJV)

Compares the reading comprehension and accuracy and listening comprehension of West Indian and English children living in England and having equivalent intellectual abilities. Finds no significant differences between the cultural groups. (FL)

Reports on a study of five multicultural third grade students' responses to literature across the interaction patterns of adult-dominated, peer-dominated, and adult-balanced social situations. Concludes that a direct relationship exists between the structure of the social interaction pattern and its consequence in verbal behavior. (FL)

Examined African American students' perceptions of African Americans who used Black English (BE) as opposed to those who used Standard English (SE). In contrast to results of previous studies with adults, these 96 junior high school students from the southern United States thought the BE speaker was more likable and competent than the SE speaker.…

Reports on a two-part study of second-grade African American students' uses of various forms of the /-s/ suffix, replicating J. Torrey's 1972 study on the correlation of language and educational achievement. Findings suggest the need to reflect diversity and flexibility in design and implementation of assessment and instruction materials and the…

This report focuses on the teaching of English to Aboriginal children in primary schools in Australia. A definition and analysis of dialectal differences between Aboriginal (Australian) English and Standard (Australian) English is offered that includes the phonological, morpho-syntactic, lexico-semantic, and pragmatic differences of the Aboriginal…

Some errors in adult black students' writing cannot be analyzed merely within the traditional hierarchy of grammatical rules; a look at sociological factors is germane to an evaluation of students' writing ability or inability. Data for an analysis of black adult students' writing at the syntactic level have shown that problems of clarity might be…

A study of the relationship of teacher attitudes toward and comprehension of Black English examined certain characteristics of a group of university graduate students in education in relation to their self-evaluations of Black English comprehension, stated attitudes, and types of interpretation errors. The characteristics of graduate students…

A study investigated errors in the writing of black students to determine how those errors were influenced by black oral English. Writing samples were gathered from 99 third grade and 68 sixth grade students in a school in an inner city, low income neighborhood. All errors in the samples were listed and analyzed. In the samples produced by the…

This report discusses the results of a study of children's spelling errors to determine whether vernacular black English (VBE) speakers and standard English speakers (SE) infer different underlying phonological representations according to their respective dialects. Subjects included two groups of beginning second graders from schools in two…

An investigation was conducted of socioeconomic differences in the cognitive style and content of mother/child interaction, through the use of a task in which mothers attempted to get their children to point to the target item in an array of four pictures. Subjects were 32 mother/child dyads, half black and half white. Within each ethnic group,…

The dangers and misuses of literary dialect as a source of information for linguistic evaluation are analyzed. "Literary dialect" is used to refer to writing in which the main purpose is the artful construction of a narrative, where the dialect representation is apt to be concerned more with giving an artful impression of a dialect than…

The competence of school-aged, black children in standard English (SE) grammatical forms, specifically, six verb structures that distinguish Black English from SE, is the focus of this study. The subjects were 198 kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade black children who attend four Title I schools in the New York City metropolitan area.…

Through taped interviews, this study investigated the pronunciation of certain consonants in a rural, deep south county in the South Georgia-North Florida area. The informants came from three groups: lower socioeconomic status (LSES) second graders, LSES senior high students, and teachers in the public schools. Some of the findings showed that…

When 130 African American college students were asked to rate the likability and desirability as a committee work partner of black-English-speaking, code-switching, or standard-English-speaking voices, they tended to prefer the speaker of standard English. Implications are discussed. (SLD)