In the first phase of this study, a graduate class in social dialects was divided into four groups. The experimental group was exposed to a detailed transformational analysis of standard and black English. They were administered a language attitude survey and completed a self-evaluation of their ability to teach effectively speakers of black…

Forty-eight black seventh-grade pupils participated in a study to test the assumption that the previously learned dialect of black inner-city pupils interferes with reading achievement. Standardized reading achievement test scores were used to classify the students in three groups representing three levels of reading proficiency. Speech variables…

This dissertation describes a study of the Black English Vernacular (BEV) based on 350 compositions written in the college classroom by 42 black students from working class and lower class families in a predominantly white university. The correlation between certain extralinguistic variables and over 20 linguistic variables was examined. Although…

The short-range purposes of this study were (1) to determine parental attitudes about the appropriateness of two varieties of Black English for their children in three contexts (classroom, neighborhood, and home) and in four language arts areas (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), and (2) to show how parents' attitudes are related to their…

This paper is divided into two sections related to an experimental program in English for black Americans. The first section is a report describing the program. In 1969, approximately 150 black students from urban ghettos in the North and rural communities in the South were admitted to the University of Wisconsin under a special scholarship…

Despite the recent focus on the role of dialect differences in creating learning difficulties for speakers of nonstandard dialects of English, research has tended to concentrate on difficulties related to speaking and reading, while ignoring those involved in teaching writing to these students. This paper attempts to meet the need for such studies…

The phenomenon of "cross-code ambiguity" is offered as one explanation of the persistence of such Negro Nonstandard English (NNE) sentences as "The man he did it." In NNE the string "The man did it" is felt to be ambiguous, referring to either "The man who did it..." or, as in Standard English (SE), "The man did it." The use here of the pleonastic…

This study was designed to investigate, describe, and compare the intonation patterns of Black English and Standard English speaking children in a reading (formal) and free discourse (informal) situation. Black English was defined as the linguistic code of the subjects sampled from the inner city black poverty area schools, and Standard English as…

This paper investigates some of the underlying assumptions prevalent in much of the research concerning the language patterns of black children and compares two competing research approaches: the deficit model, which assumes that black children from the ghetto hear very little language, much of it ill-formed, and that they are impoverished in…

This study examined whether dialect background interferes with the comprehension of school material due to structural and phonological differences and whether reading or listening is a more efficient mode for presentation of school material. The population of 304 black male adolescents was randomly assigned to four groups, and seven passages of…

This study explored whether statistically significant differences exist between the (1) grammatical structures produced by high, average, and low black, inner-city elementary readers as measured by a language competency task; and (2) whether statistically significant interactions occur between reading achievement levels and the age of the child,…

Black English, the particular variation of the English language used by many American Negroes, is frequently condemned as inferior to standard English by arbiters of language usage, but many Negroes find the structures and style of black English satisfactory for their communication needs. Black English is the result of a complex, developmental…

Four Negro children's (two average and two slow readers) oral reading was taped at eight regular intervals during their second and third year of reading instruction in order to analyze their oral reading miscues and to discover any developmental changes. Retelling of stories read was also taped to measure comprehension. The miscues were analyzed…

The recent work by sociolinguists is more accurate for consideration of urban dialects than is the analysis provided in the "Linguistic Atlas" materials. The sociolinguists' work shows that the use of nonstandard phonological and grammatical features varies according to one's socioeconomic status, ethnic background, speech context, age,…

Two lower socioeconomic groups (one black and one white) from the inner city and a third group of white children from a middle socioeconomic suburban area of Chicago were studied to delineate and compare the usage of selected language structures among children of different social and ethnic backgrounds. Usage of each of the test structures was…