The memorandum opinion and order submitted to the United States District Court judge in the Ann Arbor, Michigan case of Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children vs. the Ann Arbor School District Board concerning the educational rights of students speaking black English outlines the history of the litigation, describes the parties to…

The relationship between language and education is considered, focusing on the central role of language in learning, and two kinds of research concerned with language and educational issues are discussed. Linguistic research focuses on the language aspects and treats the educational aspect as the contextual surrounding of the problem. Educational…

A study was conducted to compare the language of preschool children from low-income homes to that of their parents, as affected by the adult participation in training sessions planned to encourage language development. The study was conducted in three preschools in the Detriot metropolitan area. A total of 96 children from ages 2 1/2 to 5…

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…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 16 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) teacher behavior patterns during episodes of reading instruction in grades 4, 5, and 6; (2) the influence of teachers' conceptual frameworks of reading on…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 13 titles deal with the following topics: confessional rhetoric in the poetry of Anne Sexton, rhetorical criticism, the Hippocratic oath, messages communicated through team sports as a medium of social interaction, the silent…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 18 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the relationship of speech communication variables to perceived communication competence; interpersonal communication in a simulation game of intercultural…

To test the effects of black English on school performance, 27 second graders in a Harlem school were interviewed and tested for competence in spontaneous speech, comprehension of oral and written materials, and oral reading, as well as for explicit grammatical knowledge of standard English morphemes often missing in black English. The data show…

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…

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…

A program designed to decrease the number of linguistically differentiated, nonstandard speakers of English in Texas classrooms and to help potential dropouts attain proficiency in the use of English (thereby allowing them to achieve mobility in the dominant Anglo-American culture) is described in this report. The program provides linguistically…

This paper considers the problem of teaching formal composition skills to those whose repertories lack formal standard speaking style. The approach advocated here is bidialectal and is based on the idea that control of a variety of language styles is a useful tool and that productive competence of formal composition style is a mandatory skill for…

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…

This paper seeks to understand the role of culturally-specific styles of discourse in the classroom. The paper uses and expands upon three categories of classroom language use (control, curriculum, and critique) to present data on how a Puerto Rican American teacher uses repetition and discourse styles that have African and African American…

This issue includes the following articles: "Towards a Sociolinguistics of Style" (Alan Bell, Gary Johnson); "Engendering Identities: Pronoun Selection as an Indicator of Salient Intergroup Identities" (Miriam Meyerhoff); "A Majority Sound Change in a Minority Community" (Carmen Fought); "Addressing the Actuation…