Purpose: Measures of grammatical accuracy are effective measures of children's language skills. However, many measures, such as percent grammatical utterances, were developed for children who speak General American English (GAE) and, therefore, may not be appropriate for students who speak other dialects. This study examines different scoring…

Purpose: The goal of the current study was to examine the impact of dialect density on the growth of oral language and reading skills in a sample of African American English (AAE)-speaking children reared in urban communities. Method: Eight hundred thirty-five African American children in first through fifth grades participated. Using an…

Designed as a 13-week self-help course to meet the speech and language needs of college students in the areas of articulation, voice control, standard American usage, and fluency, this combination syllabus and workbook offers a rationale for the course, describes course objectives and content, and provides worksheets and evaluation forms for the…

The teacher working with second-dialect students requires knowledge of the phonology used by his students to deal, not primarily with their pronunciation problems, but, with their reading and writing problems. In language classrooms, priority should be given to the aspects of language used by children that identify them as nonstandard speakers.…

Students and teachers, black and white, need to be familiarized with some of the significant linguistic and cultural differences between blacks and whites. (JH)

Via a Speak Aloud and Write protocol methodology, this study investigated the characteristics of the wording formulation process of a select group of 7 African American students in freshman composition who claimed nonstandard features were active at least 30% to 40% of the time while they composed their papers. Control of rhetorical context was…

Appraised objectively in this article is a 3-year research project that involved experimentation with audiolingual methods in teaching standard English in Freshman English classes at Chaflin College in South Carolina to Negro students who spoke a nonstandard dialect. Prior to a discussion of the effectiveness of using spelling instruction to teach…