The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of the ability to recognize standard and nonstandard speech in monolingual English-speaking as well as in bilingual Mexican-American children. The tests used consisted of sentences which were either completely standard English or which contained phonological, morphological, or…

A revised Spanish/English oral-proficiency test battery was administered to 40 Spanish-surnamed pupils equally divided by sex at grade levels 1, 3, 5, and 7. The test battery included parallel Spanish and English versions of: (1) a 12-item vocabulary pretest, (2) a 32-item vocabulary-by-domain test consisting of four sections--home, neighborhood,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the attitudes of Mexican American and Anglo American students toward speech types that represent different social and ethnic groups. The subjects were 88 Mexican American and 61 Anglo American students in the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th grades in 2 school systems. The technique used was the matched-guise…

During this investigation, information was gathered about attitudes held by Mexican American and Anglo children concerning members of specific social or ethnic groups, determining whether the attitudes developed by children in a bilingual education program were different from those of children who had been solely exposed to English education. The…

A Spanish/English oral-proficiency test battery was administered to 40 Spanish-surnamed pupils equally divided by sex at grade levels 1, 3, 5, and 7. (Author/NQ)

Spanish and English versions of a 38-item grammar test were administered to 40 Spanish-surnamed pupils equally divided by sex at grade levels K, 1, 3, and 5 (10 subjects per grade) in a bilingual education program. The test was a revision of part of an earlier test for oral proficiency in Spanish and English. The reliability of the new test was…

Major hypotheses tested in this experiment were that (a) auditory discrimination ability is influenced by the native language background of the listener and (b) auditory discrimination ability increases with maturation. The subjects were 142 English-speaking and 84 Spanish-speaking children distributed throughout the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades.…

Describes a study in which the self-reported language learning behaviors of nonnative English-speaking graduate students were described and then related to the students' gains in language proficiency during the course. Findings indicate that there are two different kinds of learning behaviors that can be accounted for by Krashen's…

Spanish and English versions of an oral proficiency test were administered to Spanish-surnamed pupils at grade levels K, one, three and five in a bilingual education program. The results indicated that achievement in English appears to be unrelated to the maintenance of Spanish for bilingual children. (Author/ND)

This study represents several years' work on devising tests to measure children's relative proficiency in two languages or speech varieties. A preliminary oral proficiency test in English and Spanish was administered to 45 bilingual students, of whom 41 took both versions. On the basis of difficulty and significant tendencies, 32 items were…

Results indicated that: communicative competence (CC) is distinct from linguistic competence (LC); LC in English and CC in English/Spanish are related to cognitive/academic learning proficiency and field independent learning style; and self-concept is positively related to LC in English, to CC in English/Spanish, and to academic achievement.…

This memorandum is a systematic listing and description of the salient features of English phonology and morphology, accompanied by a listing of parallel features in nonstandard dialects that account for the difficulties the speakers of nonstandard speech experience in the acquisition of standard English. The dialects considered are English as…

A study of the interrelationships of linguistic and communicative competence in English and Spanish, self-concept, field-independent cognitive style, and scholastic achievement among Mexican-American pupils at the elementary, junior high, and high school levels found that linguistic and communicative competence were highly related within…

This memorandum is the third in a series of publications which will ultimately combine to form the basis of a "Syllabus for the Training of Teachers of Standard English as a Second Dialect." Most of the culturally and economically disadvantaged are not native speakers of standard English, but speakers of a nonstandard dialect. The syllabus is…