It is the premise of this study that the performance of black students in math and science is crippled by the interference of their language patterns. It is argued that schoolwork of these students demonstrates how nonstandard English can lead to misunderstanding. The connection between students' misunderstandings of certain quantitative relations…

This study examined the syntax of the naturalistic speech of 15 three-to-five-year-old urban, lower-class black children, to determine (1) their syntactic maturity compared to white middle-class children of the same age, as measured by mean utterance length, types of transformations used, and number of sentence-combining transformations per t-unit…

In order to study the syntactic components which operate in the imitation and recoding of standard English by bilingual and bidialectal children, a sample of 20 multiethnic Spanish speakers and 20 black English speakers was drawn from children in the first, second, and third grades of a metropolitan bilingual program. The ability of these children…

These two related papers provide information on teacher attitudes toward black dialect use in the classroom and the measurement of such attitudes. The first paper reports on data from 176 administrators, counselors, teachers, and student teachers, revealing significant relationships between a teacher's definition of black dialect, attitudes toward…

To determine whether black children who speak a nonstandard dialect have difficulty in spelling because of the dialect features of their vocabulary, spelling tests were administered to 66 black English-speaking children in the first, second, and third grades. The results indicated that children who spoke black dialect exhibited spelling…

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…

This document contains the text of a United States District Court decision on a Michigan school district's proposed plan designed to help the teachers at a local elementary school (1) to identify those children who speak Black English and to determine the language spoken as a home or community language, and (2) to employ that knowledge in teaching…

Arguing that dialect interference in writing does not exist, this paper contends that pedagogies for teaching writing skills to native speakers of English that assume such interference are wrong. It examines arguments and evidence that support the notion of dialect interference in writing, offers counter evidence, and explores an alternative…

This paper focusses on sex contrasts in language as revealed in recent sociolinguistic research. While there are relatively few differences in subjective language identifications and judgments, there are several clear differences in objective language data. In the Detroit Language Study, women show a greater "sensitivity" to multiple…

The author takes up the problem of the origin of Negro dialects in the United States. On the basis of the very limited number of lexical items which can be traced directly to African languages, McDavid discounts the role of African influence on the patterns of current Negro English dialects. William Stewart suggests the possibility of extended…

Social dialect is demonstrated as an important factor in the low performance of Black children on language based academic achievement tests. The dialect measure accounted for a substantial percentage of the variance in reading and spelling while the IQ measure and social attitude accounted for a negligible amount of variance in these areas. The…

This four-part study, which focused on the relationship between the incidence of Black English and the child's perception that Black English is not preferred speech, identified the phonological characteristics in the dialect speech of black second grade children of low socioeconomic background in New York City public schools. Specifically, the…

This study compares the oral reading performance of Black English (BE) speaking children, bilingual Mexican American (MA) children, and Standard English (SE) speaking children who were average third grade readers. Reading performance was evaluated by a system-oriented analysis of reading errors, of recall, and of reading speed. For the reading…

Two groups of children in grades 3 and 4 (80 lower-socioeconomic Negro children whose native speech dialect was Negro nonstandard English and 80 middle-class white children whose native dialect was standard English) were given two 50-item cloze reading comprehension tests to determine the effect of native speech dialect and written language…