Many teachers lack the linguistic training required to build on the language skills that African American students from dialectally diverse backgrounds bring to school. When students correctly use the language patterns of their communities, such teachers may diagnose language deficits and attempt to teach them the "right" grammar. Research has…

The results of a study in which eight black kindergarten children responded to a set of structured tasks designed to elicit linguistic constructions which characterize Black English are presented and discussed in this Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) technical note. Some of the children responded with a high rate of nonstandard realizations;…

This study investigated how much of the Language Instruction Register (variation in language in different social situations) black-vernacular speaking children had acquired by grades one, three, and five. A sentence repetition task was devised which contained selected Language Instruction Register forms having black ghetto vernacular semantic…

This paper investigates some of the underlying assumptions prevalent in much of the research concerning the language patterns of black children and compares two competing research approaches: the deficit model, which assumes that black children from the ghetto hear very little language, much of it ill-formed, and that they are impoverished in…

An exploration of issues in language diversity addressing the nature of dialect, features of the dialect, features of black English Vernacular (BEV), linguistic phenomena in the black urban community, theories of the origins of BEV, and its social, economic, and political ramifications suggest that BEV, like other dialects, meets the needs of its…

The main purpose of this study is to measure the attitudes of teachers toward speech varieties used by speakers of Black English and to determine whether there is any evidence that those attitudes are linked to pupils' classroom performance in reading. Also investigating is whether exposure to information about and experience with varieties of…