The Reading Miscue Inventory (RMI) is a diagnostic instrument based on the assumption that reading is not letter or word decoding, but rather a process of predicting, selecting, and sampling of cues that are subsequently tested by syntactic and semantic information within both the reader and the text. In a case study of three remedial readers…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the practices and ideologies held in common by the African colonial system of education and the urban American educational system. It is advocated that the following ideas be applied from the American colonial experience to improve American ghetto schools: (1) a continued effort in assisting the American…

This research studied the effects of abstract-reasoning ability, degree of bidialectism, and grade level on listening comprehension tasks presented in both Standard English and Black English and on oral reading and oral-reading comprehension tasks presented in Standard English, Black English standard orthography, and Black English nonstandard…

The contents of this collection of articles by various authors are organized in two parts. Part I, "Innovations within the present educational system," includes the following articles: "Children and their Caretakers," N.K. Denzin; "Participation, decentralization, community control, and quality education," M.D. Fantini; "Educational Vouchers: a…

The study described here was intended to test Basil Bernstein's contention that different types of speech patterns can be identified for lower and middle class children, and that lower class children may, because of their speech behavior, have difficulty in performing cognitive tasks necessary for success in the school situation. Spontaneous…

This book is the fifth in a series of publications concerning the position and role of language in a large metropolitan area. In this sociolinguistic description Detroit is chosen as a case study of a large Northern urban area which has shown a dramatic increase in its Negro population within the last half century. The primary goal of the study…

These materials, a self-instructional workbook, a teacher's manual and accompanying tapes, are designed for students grades 7 through 12 who are speakers of the dialect sometimes called "Black Nonstandard." The terms "standard" and "nonstandard" are avoided, however, "informal" being used for the child's own dialect and "formal" for the English…

This variable rule analysis of the indefinite article "an" was done by means of a computer program developed by H. Cedergren and D. Sankoff of Montreal. The data was collected from 45-minute interviews with three different groups of college students essentially alike in age: (1) 13 whites from Louisiana, (2) 12 blacks from southwestern Ohio, and…

Black Arts Literature--of which the New Black Poetry is the most important manifestation--emerged during the past decade as the appropriate artistic counterthrust to Black Power. Rhetoric and shouting aside, this new thrust was, on a very basic level, simply a call to black folks to redefine Blackness and re-evaluate the Black Experience. For the…

The speech habits of the most oppressed --and the largest-- segment of the black population in the United States did not spring solely from an inability to handle acceptable forms of spoken English, nor mainly from the limitations caused by the particular stock of words known to the speaker. Black slang stems from a somewhat disseminated rejection…

A current vocabulary of argot terms and meanings was collected from a Black male control group in the South Central Los Angeles ghetto. This lexicon was used to elicit and compare responses from 5 male groups of youths between 15 and 20 years old. Two of the groups consisted of lower class blacks separated geographically. The other groups were…

Although some educators have advocated eradication of Black American English and other non-standard American English dialects in formal school training, it is recognized that many dialects are effectively used to a great degree by many Americans. Black American English, like other dialects, is a legitimate linguistic system that has logic,…

The focus group method has rapidly gained credibility among researchers in many fields, including public health researchers. The increased use of focus groups by public health researchers has underscored the demonstrable need for the capacity to apply this method of research among populations with limited abilities in or cultural resistance to…

Developed in conjunction with a graduate course and used in classrooms with all types of learners, this paper presents a 6-week unit of study on slavery based on two adolescent novels--"NIGHTJOHN" by Gary Paulson and "My Name Is not Angelica" by Scott O'Dell. After a brief introduction to the unit, the paper presents the 14 activities of the unit:…

For an educator who teaches English in a multicultural setting, the best way to accommodate marked features of African-American vernacular English (AAVE) in black students' freshman essays is to preserve these features in teaching students narrative writings and guide African-American students to avoid these features in expository (academic)…