This study investigated the effect of two social dialects, Black English (BE) and standard English (SE), and word frequency on performance in blending and word recognition. The subjects were 60 second-grade children from three ethnic groups: 20 white SE speaking children, 20 black BE speaking children, and 20 black SE speaking children. The…

Syntactical rule differences in black dialect that can be more helpful to young adolescents' perceptions than the corresponding rules in standard English were studied. The syntactical rule in black dialect that was identified as being more explicit than the corresponding rule in standard English was the invariant "be" verb form (as in…

This study investigated differences in the writing styles of African American and European American test takers using a portfolio entry assessment as a means of examining writing style, focusing on language choice, rhetorical style, and organization. The portfolio entry was from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Middle…

A discussion of the role of sociolinguistics in the treatment of communication disorders focuses on issues related to dialect and language variation. It begins with an examination of linguistic diversity and dynamic description of language, reporting on a study of speech and language pathologists' judgments of sentences in African American…

Findings about black language and speaking behavior may help increase understanding and accommodation of black students in education. While something is known about Black English as a medium of communication, little is known about the language itself. The teacher must learn to recognize basic linguistic and performance features of black English,…

The Test of Language Development--Intermediate (TOLD-I) was administered to 26 learning disabled (LD) and 26 nonLD elementary aged black children. The subjects were matched for age, IQ, and class placement. Statistically significant differences were found between the two groups on four of the five subtests of the TOLD-I. The data also were…

Working on the assumption that listeners would be more convinced and persuaded by a speaker with whom they could identify, a study asked black and white college students to evaluate a speaker with a black or white dialect, introducing them to an innovation in mathematics. Half of the black subjects were randomly assigned to listen to a black…

This study compares the ability of 37 Standard-English-speaking graduate students to comprehend Black English versions of a set of 45 utterances with the ability of 37 comparable students to comprehend Standard English versions of the same utterances. Of the two stimulus tapes used (consisting of 45 sentences each), one was recorded in Black…

Although the black poet Melvin B. Tolson is recognized and respected by other poets and critics, he is unknown both to students and to the general reading public. This paper points out that the key to understanding Tolson's poetry, and much of the poetry coming out of black America, is his use of language. The paper examines one of Tolson's major…

This paper presents an investigation of elementary teachers' attitudes toward Black dialects, and an analysis of these expressed attitudes in terms of specific variables--sex, age, race, and educational background. Further analyses dealt with racial balance in the class, grade level taught and perceived socioeconomic background of the pupils.…

This study investigated verbal behavior of five third-grade children representing three cultural groups: Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean, and white. Ten sessions involving various language arts activities were tape recorded over a five-week period; session 7 was also videotaped. Sessions 3 to 10 involved group interaction across three interaction…

The debate about the use of Black English has been raging for many years, with no real solutions and few practical suggestions to help teachers and African-American students handle the situation in the classroom. Tensions are often heightened by misconceptions about Standard English--that it is a White man's language and necessary for success and…

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…

To advocate the work of Gregory Bateson, especially his Double-Bind theory, this paper describes how the theory can be applied to particular instances and to the general experience of black students in a predominantly white, authoritarian college setting. The paper argues that miscues on the part of black students in the classroom and in writing…

This document describes a course in the teaching of reading for content-area teachers, which has been offered at Temple University since 1970. It was designed to help English, science, and social studies teachers meet state certification requirements in reading. The theoretical base of the course is psycholinguistic, with a major emphasis upon…