Compares teacher expectations for Black children who speak Black Dialect with Black children who speak Standard English. Concludes that teachers expect significantly greater overall academic achievement, reading success, and intelligence from children who speak Standard English. (MM)

Papers from a conference on the role of language in the academic achievement of African Americans include: "Language Diversity and Academic Achievement in the Education of African American Students: An Overview of the Issues" (John R. Rickford); "The Language of African American Students in Classroom Discourse" (Courtney B.…

Second-grade Black children who speak Black English (BE) were compared with Black and White age peers who speak Standard English (SE) on auditory sound blending and word recognition tasks presented in both BE and SE form. BE speakers were bidialectal and performed best on SE materials in a school situation. (Author/RD)

Argues that the belief that black English is bad English or ungrammatical is inconsistent with empirical linguistic evidence to the contrary and discusses some of the sociolinguistic, educational, and political aspects of the debate over the role of black English in educational settings. (34 references) (MDM)

Argues that it is important for Black students and for all students to understand that Black English is indeed a language with rules, beauty, and power so that they come to respect it, respect its history, and respect their own bilingualism. (SR)

This paper examines the step show or code-switching involving two dialects of English, Standard American English (SAE) and Black English Vernacular (BEV) at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The data point to a reversal of dominant institutional language and literacy practices at the university under focus. The conscious and…

Via a Speak Aloud and Write protocol methodology, this study investigated the characteristics of the wording formulation process of a select group of 7 African American students in freshman composition who claimed nonstandard features were active at least 30% to 40% of the time while they composed their papers. Control of rhetorical context was…

For scholars of literacy and educational linguistics, the years 2004 and beyond have given them cause to not only revisit racial issues 50 years after "Brown v. Board of Education," but also to revisit 25 years of language and racial politics since "the Martin Luther King Black English case." This chapter discusses what needs…

This paper, the personal recollections of an experienced New York City public school teacher and emeritus professor of education, makes some points about "ebonics" and Black students. The paper states that when Black students in a district are assigned to special education out of proportion to their numbers, there is a fundamental…

Sharing concerns and interests of New York State educators in the improvement of literacy, this annual journal raises educational issues such as appropriate, effective instruction and assessment for all of New York's children. A central thread found in many of the articles is the importance of authenticity and inclusion. A second strand reflects…

This book uses an ethnographic approach to collect and analyze patterns of language and culture that affect interracial communication and culture. The study selects patterns of behavior, or elements within patterns, and maps black and white cognitive territory in order to reveal the cultural reasons for communications difficulties. The book…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 34 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) object conservation and receptive language in day care center infants; (2) the syntactic incorporation of linguistic units; (3) implicit theories of meaning in…

The study described here concerned the perceptions of White college students in a college of education about the educational, professional, and social status of speakers of Black English. The subjects were 46 students in two undergraduate classes in communication disorders. Each class was presented with a different recording of a passage about a…

Using data consisting of descriptive and expressive-narrative essays written in 1969 and 1979 by black 17-year-old students in the stratified probability sample from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a study investigated which language patterns differentiated the NAEP essays written by black students in 1969 from those…

A major problem that continues to plague United States education is the fact that large numbers of disadvantaged black students are not learning to read well enough to function in society. This paper discusses three reasons for the problem of teaching reading to these students. First, there exist no comprehensive developmental reading theories, no…