Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's "Dialogic Imagination" and Henry Louis Gates'"Signifying Monkey," an analysis of an African American student's essay reveals codes that are distinct to African Americans. Bakhtin's theory alerts scholars to the extent to which language is a social phenomenon. Ambiguous and heteroglossic, it reflects…

An analysis of perfect verb forms in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) looks at the distribution of forms by semantic function and co-occurrence patterns in Samana English and ex-slave recordings. Results suggest that despite the overall rarity of this category in the general realm of past time, the most frequent forms used to mark it…

A study analyzed the degree to which an African American verbal tradition (Black English Vernacular) survives in the writing of Black students across a generational time span. A total of 867 essays from the 1984 and the 1988/89 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were subjected to primary trait and holistic scoring analysis, and…

Two major theories trace the origins of black English to African influence or British Isles influence. According to the African origin theory, black English was created through pidginization, creolization, and decreolization as Africans came into contact with Europeans through the slave trade. The second theory holds that most black English…

Bias based on race, ethnicity, sex, color, class, or other characteristics is a problem nationally and internationally. Both overt and covert incidences occur in educational settings where most educators begin to work with little or no practical experience with the cultural groups they encounter in the student population. Thus the behaviors of…

To discover whether increased exposure to and understanding of figurative uses of language would result in improved performance on a metaphorical language comprehension test, gains were measured on a figurative language test that was administered twice, approximately four months apart, to a total of 319 elementary school children in Harlem, New…

The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate that the fields of linguistics, dialectology, language education, and early reading would be well served by a word book of the Black English vernacular. Chapters are devoted to discussion of the social significance of a lexicon of Black English vernacular, the terminology of sex and lovemaking, religion…

This document presents the proceedings of the Columbus, Ohio conference on school desegregation. Among the topics that are covered in this conference are the following: (1) the development of a state formula to assist local school districts in Ohio, (2) an overview (ranging from Plessy to Penick) of the legal aspect of school desegregation, (3)…

This study was designed to identify and analyze some of the common linguistic patterns that impede the academic progress of black students entering college. A questionnaire, distributed to educators in communication skills on the college level, asked for the identification of common black linguistic features according to familiarity and use in…

Research indicates that dialect is used in children's books to suggest the geographic background, social class, educational level, and intelligence of literary characters. Several studies show, however, that young readers develop negative attitudes about characters who speak nonstandard dialects and that these attitudes are intensified if the…

Two experiments investigated the relationship between cultural schemata and reading comprehension. Subjects for the first experiment were 186 eighth grade students who attended one of five schools--two predominately black inner-city schools, two predominately white working class area schools, and a predominately white agricultural area school.…

It has been argued that nonstandard dialects interfere with the attainment of literacy. The proposition that black vernacular English (BVE) has a measurably significant effect on reading achievement has never been demonstrated, although it is a widely held belief. What studies do reveal is an equivocal relationship between dialect and achievement…

Thirty-four preservice teachers listened to children's tape-recorded responses to selected questions. The children were rehearsed to present either relevant and logical (high quality) responses or irrelevant and illogical (low quality) responses. The children also were rehearsed to verbalize either responses that contained selected nonstandard…

This study focused on one of the suggested causes of the poor academic performance evident among many black, lower socioeconomic status children, namely teachers' attitudes toward Black English. There is considerable empirical evidence to suggest that speakers of Black English are evaluated as inferior to speakers of Standard English by their…

A study was undertaken to determine if the removal of black English dialect as oral reading errors would influence the scores obtained on three oral reading diagnostic tests: the Gray Oral Reading Test, the Gilmore Oral Reading Test, and the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales. In addition, the study investigated whether there were differences in the…