This booklet is an annotated bibliography of recent work about the reading performance of Black-English-speaking children. The first half of the book lists materials according to the factors that influence the reading performance of black children: dialect interference, intellectual ability, environment, perceptual deficiencies, self-concept,…

This course is designed to give university students an introduction to the varying social and cultural backgrounds of students in inner city communities. Materials in the areas of literature, music, and history are assigned and presented to these future teachers. Class presentations are used to help students to broaden their perspectives and…

A study explored the relationship between oral and written patterns produced by a group of black college freshmen enrolled in remedial writing classes. Forty students were asked to produce, in formal language style, both oral and written summaries of a reading selection. The data were analyzed to determine (1) the extent to which patterns,…

A curriculum guide was prepared for the teaching of standard oral English in the Los Angeles junior high schools. This guide focuses particularly on the teaching of standard English to Negro students using a nonstandard dialect. The lessons were designed for use with accompanying tapes and filmstrips. (See also UD 007703 for parallel program to…

Although the black poet Melvin B. Tolson is recognized and respected by other poets and critics, he is unknown both to students and to the general reading public. This paper points out that the key to understanding Tolson's poetry, and much of the poetry coming out of black America, is his use of language. The paper examines one of Tolson's major…

This paper expresses concern that teachers do not agree on when, where, and how to deal with the non-standard English of blacks and other minorities. Sections of the paper discuss a definition of Black English, some forms and patterns of Black English, the language development of black children, the black child and the school, implications for…

This conference report summarizes major speeches, including such topics as "Teaching Effective Writing Skills to Dialectically Different Students" and "New Approaches for Teaching Students Standard English." The four objectives of this landmark conference were as follows: (1) to assist black and other minority students in the acquisition of…

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the awareness and application of Black English features by writers and producers of materials for young children which represent black characters in a fictive setting. The study was limited to materials which were available to inner city children in Cleveland, Ohio, through libraries. Fifty-three fiction…

The purpose of this study was to change preservice teachers' attitudes toward black English in a positive way. The students were shown that the deep structure of black English and standard English is the same; it is only the surface structures of the two dialects that exhibit variations. Pre-test data garnered from the control group and the…

This study was designed to explore the role of the syntax of beginning readers' spoken language in their reading performance. In order to be able to isolate and manipulate the syntactic variable, two alternative forms of English, Standard English and Black English, were used. Sixty second-grade children participated in the study. Each child was…

This paper presents an investigation of elementary teachers' attitudes toward Black dialects, and an analysis of these expressed attitudes in terms of specific variables--sex, age, race, and educational background. Further analyses dealt with racial balance in the class, grade level taught and perceived socioeconomic background of the pupils.…

Most compensatory early childhood programs are based on an assumption of linguistic and cognitive deficits which must be remedied if the Negro child is to succeed in school, but much collected data questions this assumption. The language of many lower class Negro children has been shown to be well-ordered and highly structured, although the…

This study was conducted to explore the idea that the Negro dialect operates as a source of interference in the acquisition of reading skills by Negro children. Two first grade classes from an Oakland, California, inner city school were chosen to participate in this experiment. The pupils were all pretested. Half of them were then randomly chosen…

The regularity with which much variation between forms, formerly dismissed as "free variation," can be accounted for on the basis of extra-linguistic and independent linguistic factors has made the concept of the linguistic variable an invaluable construct in the description of patterned speech variation. The linguistic variable, itself…

This collection of articles discusses social dialects, the problems that dialects cause the disadvantaged, and how these problems can be overcome in curriculum planning and classroom practice. Articles are (1) "English: New Dimensions and New Demands" by Muriel Crosby, (2) "A Checklist of Significant Features for Discriminating Social Dialects" by…