A study investigated errors in the writing of black students to determine how those errors were influenced by black oral English. Writing samples were gathered from 99 third grade and 68 sixth grade students in a school in an inner city, low income neighborhood. All errors in the samples were listed and analyzed. In the samples produced by the…

This report discusses the results of a study of children's spelling errors to determine whether vernacular black English (VBE) speakers and standard English speakers (SE) infer different underlying phonological representations according to their respective dialects. Subjects included two groups of beginning second graders from schools in two…

Perhaps the most controversial and provocative issue in the discussion of reading failure in inner-city schools has been the relationship between Black English Vernacular (BEV), reading failure, and reading instruction. The debate has focused on the degree to which BEV does or does not interfere with the acquisition of reading/language arts…

An investigation was conducted of socioeconomic differences in the cognitive style and content of mother/child interaction, through the use of a task in which mothers attempted to get their children to point to the target item in an array of four pictures. Subjects were 32 mother/child dyads, half black and half white. Within each ethnic group,…

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES THE INTERSECTION OF THE NONSTANDARD ENGLISH DIALECT OF THE URBAN GHETTOS AND STANDARD ENGLISH. THE AUTHORS DRAW ON SOME PRELIMINARY DATA GATHERED IN PERSONAL INTERVIEWS, INCLUDING A RANDOM SAMPLE OF 100 LOWER- AND MIDDLE-INCOME ADULTS IN THREE AREAS OF SOUTH CENTRAL HARLEM. ALTHOUGH NEGRO SPEECH PATTERNS HAVE BEEN EXPLAINED AS…

Because the style and language of the black folk tradition have contributed significantly to the development of the English language, an analysis of black persuasive techniques and black communication systems can enhance the teaching of composition, rhetoric, and literature for both black and white students. Some of the persuasive techniques of…

The dangers and misuses of literary dialect as a source of information for linguistic evaluation are analyzed. "Literary dialect" is used to refer to writing in which the main purpose is the artful construction of a narrative, where the dialect representation is apt to be concerned more with giving an artful impression of a dialect than…

The competence of school-aged, black children in standard English (SE) grammatical forms, specifically, six verb structures that distinguish Black English from SE, is the focus of this study. The subjects were 198 kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade black children who attend four Title I schools in the New York City metropolitan area.…

A review of the literature on Black English was made to determine what information is available and to assess the credibility of the information. The review covered the years from 1865 through the first half of 1975. More than 75 documents were identified as potentially informative in the area of investigation. The linguistic features of Black…

The purpose of this study was to discover the effect of the introduction of nonstandard English dialect and lexicon in the classroom and to test the hypotheses that students exposed to oral material in dialect and lexicon would comprehend more, would have greater verbal recall, and would be more flexible and fluent in assigning titles to oral…

The Introduction to this Teacher's Manual describes the objectives of the "Psycholinguistics Reading Series" as being twofold: (1) to provide an effective approach to the teaching of beginning reading to Afro-American children whose language patterns differ in some basic aspects from those employed in traditional basal readers, and (2)…

University of Kentucky personnel aided Kentucky State College, a predominately black institution, establish the Reading and Study Skills Laboratory in 1967. This study examines the program which was designed for those students deemed academic high risks. All persons enrolled in the lab had decided disadvantages in an academic world because of…

Noam Chomsky's numerous criticisms of formerly well-accepted beliefs about the nature of language learning (e.g. in his review of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior") have led to a diversity of views regarding the potential application of transformational theory to the teaching of English as a second language/dialect. It seems clear, moreover, that his…

The First Lincolnland Conference on Dialectology, held at Eastern Illinois University in March 1968, was attended by linguists and speech pathologists specializing in the areas of speech science, dialects, articulation disorders, language development and language disorders. The purposes of the conference were: (1) to review research dealing with…

Two groups of blacks, adults and teenagers, served as the focus of this study. The "peer-prepared" method was used to produce dialect reading material for both groups. Both black teenagers and adults contributed stories by tape recording stories of an informal nature. The stories contributed by the black adults were edited and locally…