A video tape of a freshman composition student at the University of Arizona shows the difficulty she has faced in writing classes because of her black dialect. Her instructor points out that the student, after some of the readdings in class, recognizes that she has learned code switching on her own to survive in the educational system; this…

Two studies compared the impact of black and white audiences on black students' writing style. In the first study, eight students in an all-black intermediate composition class completed one argumentative draft addressed to black opponents and one addressed to white opponents on two different topics. The essays were examined for stylistic features…

Eighty-four students in a graduate course on methods and materials for reading in the elementary school participated in a study of the effects of black dialect syntactical features on teacher judgements of reader ability. Each person listened to four tape recordings of the same 255-word passage. The recordings varied by race of reader, number of…

Three studies, involving 140 black third grade students reading below grade level, sought to determine whether dialect interference negatively affected reading comprehension. The first investigation found that a story could be repatterned to significantly reduce the number of miscues and minimize dialect interference between the student's oral…

A study investigated the relationship between phonological features in the oral reading of black West Indians and their reading comprehension. Subjects were 54 college students at the College of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas. Each subject was recorded reading two passages and completed two cloze tests. The tapes then were analyzed for nine…

Dialects have features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that distinguish them from other varieties of a language; they exist in all languages and occur when members of one group communicate more among themselves than they do with speakers of another group. Black English vernacular (BEV) is a fully formed linguistic system with its own…

The characteristics of several nonstandard dialects of American English are presented in this paper in the form of an inventory of features. It has been compiled with the recognition that nonstandard dialects are governed by pronunciation and grammatical rules and that within the broad category of nonstandard dialects, regional and ethnic…

The reading act and the teaching of black children should not be treated as incidental by either white or black educators. The role of teacher-training institutions should be to instruct future teachers in the reading processes, reading readiness stages, basal reading programs, formal and informal reading tests, black dialects, reading approaches,…

Catherine Prendergast challenges compositionists to investigate how privileging whiteness perpetuates racism in the classroom. In response to Prendergast's challenge, this paper examines the "white ground" of composition classes by complying with Ian Marshall and Wendy Ryan's suggestion to "look closely at how the "politics of…

Many linguists, sociologists, and educators see the nonstandard form of speech used by African-American students as a substandard, imperfect copy of Standard English (SE), marred by a number of careless and ignorant errors, rather than as something to be studied and understood in its own right. Many African-American college students continue to…

The number of minority children who are placed in special education programs is disproportionate to the number of minority children in school. One factor causing this situation is that dialect interference causes lower reading scores among minority children. Since few standardized tests instruct the teacher to ignore errors attributable to…

This paper relates linguistic theory and bidialectalism, synthesizes theory and research concerning bidialectalism, and presents suggestions for a curriculum designed to maximize students' self-conscious control over their speech. Instructional activities, which have standard English as their goal, include pattern drills, short memorized dramas,…

This study attempted to assess the linguistic competence of black lower-class speakers within each of two language systems: standard English and Black English. The subjects were 72 black kindergarten, third-, and sixth-graders in a predominantly black community in Toledo, Ohio. All children attending the school were considered lower-class, since…

Although lower socioeconomic status (SES) black children have been shown to be inferior to middle-SES white children in communication accuracy, whether the problem is in encoding (production), decoding (comprehension), or both is not clear. To evaluate encoding and decoding separately, tape recordings of picture descriptions were obtained from…

The primary focus of this paper is on black children and the relationship between their productive and receptive language competencies. The solutions which have been proposed to solve the dilemma of black pupils' poor reading achievement are discussed. It is noted that none of the proposed solutions has the unqualified support provided by a mass…