This paper provides some examples of American English that have been borrowed from other cultures and languages, and proposes that teachers develop students' lifelong reading interests through the study of folklore and dialect materials. Language development and appreciation relate to personal identity development insofar as individuals express…

This study examined the degree to which readers' affective responses to levels of language usage reflect their attitudes toward language usage. The subjects, 51 college juniors and seniors, read nine simulated newspaper interviews and completed five semantic differential scales that indicated their impressions of the interviewee's personality and…

An historical review of cultural pluralism in the United States provides the framework for this consideration of the affirmative action program in the Dallas Independent School District (Texas). The program was designed to eliminate institutional racism through initiating structural changes in curriculum and program improvement, management,…

The purpose of this study was to describe the pronunication of American college students learning French. To gather the data a set of 21 sounds, all theoretically in contrast with English sounds, was chosen. These were elicited in a series of sessions during the subjects' first semester of French. The subjects recorded their pronunciation on…

Previous interpretations of male/female discourse were examined in light of new data generated from a study of intercultural mixed-sex dyads. Eleven dyads, each consisting of a Chinese and an American subject, were videotaped in 30-minute conversations about courtship in different cultures. The tapes were content analyzed to obtain information on…

Existing literature on pronunciation instruction in English as a second language is reviewed, revealing that significant attention to the improvement of American English pronunciation among foreign students has been lacking. For the teacher's benefit, an analysis of basic phonetics is presented, laying a foundation for understanding pronunciation…

A review of the various grammatical traditions from traditional grammar through structural linguistics to transformational grammar points out that traditional and transformational grammar are neither mutually exclusive nor entirely contradictory. Implications drawn from modern inquiry include the necessity for reading and writing teachers to guide…

This bilingual annotated bibliography of French and English films about the Indians and Inuit of North America contains entries for more than 1200 films made between 1965 and 1978. Although most of the films are in English, about 100 French films are included. Their titles are listed alphabetically in an Index of "Films in French". There…

In comparing the written and oral English syntax of Mexican-American bilingual and Anglo-American monolingual students, this study sought to learn specifically whether these two groups of students represent the same speech population in English syntactic use. A total of 70 subjects were randomly selected for the four groups (bilingual and…

This annotated bibliography of recent studies on language variation presents abstracts which appeared in "Resources in Education" during the period September 1973 through December 1974. They include entries from several of the ERIC clearinghouses: Adult Education, Reading and Communication Skills, Languages and Linguistics, Early…

The following conference papers are included here: (1) "Language Typology and Contrastive Linguistics," by Laszlo Dezso and William Nemser, summarizes the history of typology and discusses the application of typology to research on language acquisition. (2) "Contrastive Aspects of British and American English with Implications for…

The aim of the research reported here was to describe dialect diversity in Appalachia (Monroe and Mercer Counties, West Virginia) and to examine the possible effect of this diversity on education. The present volume contains the first two parts of the report, the third being submitted separately. The first part includes chapters 1-5, the second…

To clarify the role of dialect in the ever-changing English language and to demonstrate its relationship to efficient communication, this curriculum guide has been organized around an outline which includes the examination of such topics as exploration of regional dialects, geography of pronunciation differences, geographic and regional assessment…

Summarizing recent research on evaluative reactions toward Mexican American speech varieties, the paper obtained contrasting evaluative reactions for standard English versus standard Spanish, for standard English versus highly accented English, and for varying degrees of accented English. Anglo and Mexican American adolescents from a Chicago high…

Syntactical rule differences in black dialect that can be more helpful to young adolescents' perceptions than the corresponding rules in standard English were studied. The syntactical rule in black dialect that was identified as being more explicit than the corresponding rule in standard English was the invariant "be" verb form (as in…