To make teachers more aware of certain linguistic skills possessed by black children, why they are important, and how they might be capitalized upon in the classroom, this report examines the manipulation of figurative devices within the black community. The discussion focuses on seven forms of communicative devices prevalent in black language:…

Undertakes a critical language analysis of the Oakland Unified School District's 1996 resolution on Ebonics, focusing on the form, content, and function of the resolution's explicit text semantics as distinct from the public statements made about it. Discusses how the resolution frames Ebonics as a non-English-related system. (Author/SLD)

AFTER TAPE RECORDING AND ANALYZING INFORMAL CONVERSATIONS WITH KINDERGARTEN AND THIRD-GRADE NEGRO CHILDREN IN THE CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS, A PROGRAM OF LANGUAGE ARTS INSTRUCTION WAS DRAWN UP TO (1) USE ACTUAL STATEMENTS MADE BY THE CHILD IN HIS DIALECT FOR CONTRAST WITH STANDARD ENGLISH, (2) LIMIT PATTERN PRACTICE TO VERBS AND TO STATEMENTS EASILY…

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…

There are three approaches to the nonstandard dialects of Negro inner-city children: eradication; biloquialism, sometimes called functional bidialectism; and appreciation of dialect differences with no attempt to change speech patterns. The essays in the present volume are all written from the biloquialist point of view, which advocates that…

For many black students, the school language differs significantly from the home language, but preservice education rarely examines this issue. This article examines implications for teaching children who use two different forms of language to navigate the demands of their contrasting sociolinguistic speech communities, discussing: how teacher…

Examines the concept of linguistic legitimacy (and illegitimacy) using three specific cases--Black English, American Sign Language, and Esperanto. The paper argues that legitimacy is grounded more on personal, political, and ideological biases than on linguistic criteria. (SM)

This study focused on one of the suggested causes of the poor academic performance evident among many black, lower socioeconomic status children, namely teachers' attitudes toward Black English. There is considerable empirical evidence to suggest that speakers of Black English are evaluated as inferior to speakers of Standard English by their…

This study was conducted to explore the idea that the Negro dialect operates as a source of interference in the acquisition of reading skills by Negro children. Two first grade classes from an Oakland, California, inner city school were chosen to participate in this experiment. The pupils were all pretested. Half of them were then randomly chosen…

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…

Many black students speak a nonprestige dialect called black English, which places them at a disadvantage academically and socially. This monograph describes the features of black English, defines its use, discusses several theories of its origin, and offers some methods for teaching black students standard spoken usage as another style of speech.…

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…

This paper serves as an introduction to a group of papers produced by the Classroom Interaction Project of the Center for Research in Social Behavior at the University of Missouri in Columbia. This project has been chiefly concerned with ascertaining if black-ghetto and white-suburban classrooms use language differently and, if so, in what ways.…

Jamaican dialect among Blacks in Britain seems to help unify working-class Black youth, thus making it a political, as well as a cultural resource, in the development of Black identity. However, this language form also contributes to differences between some first- and second-generation Afro-Caribbean Blacks in Britain. (IS)

Verbal and nonverbal patterns of communication found in the black community are discussed in this paper. They have been selected on the basis of their potential as interference factors in intergroup communication. A section on black language describes and explains the following categories: rapping, running it down, jiving, shucking, copping a…