During the past fifteen years, a variety of linguistic analyses of the tense and aspect systems of dialects of English has been conducted. These analyses were bounded by several analytic dimensions. This paper treats three of these dimensions and discusses their interrelationships and implications in relation to two dialects--Black English and…

This paper, which deals chiefly with Black English (BE), is an attempt "to exemplify some general principles concerning the nature of nonstandard dialects" with the chief goal of demonstrating the legitimacy of such dialects and fostering an attitude of respect towards them. The following points are stressed: (1) BE shares many features with other…

Various trends in linguistics research as they are currently applied to reading instruction are described. The rationale of both Bloomfield and Fries stressing the alphabetic principle of sound-letter correspondence is evaluated, and research comparing the effectiveness of applying this principle with other approaches to beginning reading is…

Strengthening and changing the curriculum to meet the needs of the inner-city child must be done by recognizing both the cultural aspects of the child's environment and the actual problems that he faces rather than by imposing traditional middle-class values, activities, and language. Steps suggested to both the teacher and the parent for…

The 804 entries in this bibliography are divided into four major categories. The first category, regional dialects, is concerned with those varieties of English which are confined within specific areas of the continental United States. The second, social dialects, is concerned with varieties of English which have features that tend to be…

When teaching composition to speakers of Black English, instructors should be aware of the dominance of oral expression in black culture and base the writing program on developing the students' present language abilities. The social value placed by inner-city blacks on oral expression is evident in the varying verbal contests carried out when…

This study demonstrated that black first grade children from disadvantaged backgrounds understood a Black English version of a story better than an equivalent Standard English version. The testing was done in South Georgia. The story was "peer-prepared," that is, it was a story told by a black child about his own experiences and in his own words.…

Morphological features in the speech of Southern white and Negro students at four grade levels were studied by an instrument designed to test the students' knowledge of fifteen inflectional endings (including the allomorphs of the regular plural, singular possessive and third person singular present, absence of the plural possessive, and the…

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…

The syntactical speech characteristics of black children living in depressed areas of an Eastern city were compared with the eight identified by Baratz, i.e., absence of "s" in the third person singular, zero copula, double negation and "ain't," zero past marker, zero possessive marker, zero plural marker, the substitution of "did" or "can" for…

At present, there is virtually no empirical evidence of the success of educational techniques designed to minimize the interference of black English on the acquisition of reading skills. The 180 black, inner-city third and fifth graders who participated in this study were selected in order to determine whether the discrepancy between performance…

Results of a study are discussed which involved first grade black children who produced multiple instances of linguistic variables. The suggestion is made that the standard English "is" and "has" in certain constructions have been reanalyzed as nominal inflections. (RM)

The effect of nonstandard language usage (specifically Black speech styles and rural accents) on employment opportunities was explored through recorded interviews with White employers. Statistical regressions indicated that speech style and ethnicity had significant impacts on various employment ratings. (MF)

It is suggested that questions which have been asked in research addressed to efforts to improve black children's reading have been unsatisfactory. The literature on reading problems in black children is examined for theoretical and ethnic relevance. (Author/GC)

Measures of abstract reasoning ability, degree of bidialectism, and reading performance were administered to Black, inner-city third and fifth graders. Abstract reasoning ability significantly affected reading performance while expressive proficiency in Standard English and Black English did not significantly affect scores. The importance of…