A detailed study is reported of the linguistic adaptation of a white girl in a predominantly black school in Camden, New Jersey. The girl is a cultural heroine in the area, having earned the admiration of both blacks, and Puerto Ricans by her ability in fighting, dancing, talking, and dealing with the opposite sex. Subjective reaction tests show…

It is suggested that the static model of language which is prerequisite for contrastive analysis is inadequate in pinpointing potential difficulties in second language learning. The student learning graphemic-phonetic correspondences encounters two types of difficulties not exposed by contrastive analysis: dialectal difficulties and reading…

The linguistic theory of contrastive analysis, which provides pragmatic insights into the teaching of foreign languages, can be equally successful when applied to the teaching of one dialect of a language to speakers of its other dialects. This paper briefly illustrates how a theoretically constructed hierarchy of difficulty, originally designed…

An international conference on creole languages and educational development was held at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, from July 24-28, 1972. It was attended by scholars from Africa, Australia, Hawaii, the Caribbean region, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. The papers presented were descriptions of a…

In recent years a considerable amount of interest has developed in language variability and in the educational problems connected with it. This volume is a report of linguistic research on the variable language behavior in a community of American English speakers, specifically on some aspects of tense marking in Black English. The following topics…

How can teachers make sound pedagogical decisions and advocate for educational policies that best serve the needs of students in today's diverse classrooms? What is the pedagogical value of providing culturally and linguistically diverse students greater access to their own language and cultural orientations? This landmark volume responds to the…

Until the 1880s, the language of instruction and that spoken by students was dictated by the culture of the community. Although public officials advised immigrants to use American English rather than their mother tongues, no legislation was enacted mandating English as the official language of education. However, with sizeable groups of immigrants…

This study investigated the effects of interference of a native dialect in the acquisition of a second dialect. Four groups of subjects were used: Five white preschool children from an intergrated nursery school, five Black preschool children from a Head Start program, five white, middle-class 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds, and five Black 16-, 17-,…

This paper draws from a number of sources, from Muhammad Ali to TV commercials, to demonstrate the quite different conceptions that black and white Americans have of the meaning of boasting and bragging. For blacks, boasting and bragging are two distinct ways of speaking and communication. Boasting is a joking, playful verbal bahavior, not to be…

The 25 selected papers contained in this volume reflect the current diversity of interests and research methods within the field of sociolinguistics. Titles include: "What is a Language?"; "The Unreality of Quantitative Figures"; "Addressee-Oriented Features in Spoken Discourse"; "Women's Speech, Women's…

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…

This study describes the syntactic features of Black English Vernacular (BEV) spoken by black characters in three black situation comedies on American television: "The Jeffersons,""Good Times," and "What's Happening." Using scripts and audio tapes of three episodes from each series during the 1977-78 television season, transcripts were made of…

Linguists and psychologists have disagreed concerning the development and nature of children's social perceptions of others on the basis of speech differences. The present study sought to determine in what ways 8- and 9-year olds from different socioeconomic backgrounds might react to dialect differences. Ninety-two randomly selected 8- and…

Essays on English in South Africa and its neighboring countries include: "A History of English in South Africa" (Len Lanham); "English in South African Society: A Preliminary Overview" (Bill Branford); "Black English in South Africa" (David Gough); "Language Contact, Transmission, Shift: South African Indian…

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…