One of the most significant problems that linguists face in their attempts to describe Vernacular Black English (VBE) is the matter of fluctuating forms. It is consistently observed that speakers appear to fluctuate between a socially stigmatized variant and its presumed nonstigmatized counterpart. Fluctuations in VBE have often been viewed as a…

This study traces the syntactic interference of the dialect of 176 black children (grades 1-6) living in south-central Los Angeles when they attempt to speak standard English in the school and correlates the amount of interference with certain socioeconomic variables. Syntactical interference items investigated include verb agreement, tense,…

Oral tradition, both rural and urban, forms an infrastructure for this anthology, which presents selections of black poetry with an emphasis on the poetry of the sixties. Based on the thesis that the new black poetry's main referents are black speech and black music, the anthology includes examples from the oral tradition of folk sermon,…

Sociolinguists have proposed various beginning reading approaches to remedy the reading problems of disadvantaged black children. Their programs reflect their theoretical biases concerning the nature of Black English and the type and degree of interference that may exist between the language of the Standard English (SE) text and the child's…

The selections in this book reflect a concern for understanding urban ghetto vernicular and its implications for teachers. Chapter one provides preliminary information on Black English and an orientation to the linguistic viewpoint taken by the remaining articles. Chapter two discusses the social conditions under which Black English may be spoken;…

An investigation was conducted to test the assumption that Black English (BE) dialect interferes with reading. Data from 45 lower standard English (SE) speakers were collected and analyzed to measure racial group differences on auditory discrimination, oral reading, BE phonology usage, and silent reading comprehension. Dialect differences analyzed…

The ways speakers of Black English modify features of their spoken dialect in the process of adapting their language to writing are examined in this dissertation, on the basis of a corpus of writing from 41 black students enrolled in a St. Louis community college composition course. Each student is represented by 500 to 1000 words of writing…

Nonsensical statements about the inferiority of non-standard English should be revealed as nonsense by linguistic analysis--there being no point in marshalling empirical evidence to refute meaningless propositions.

This article criticizes a resolution drafted by the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. It argues that the framers of the resolution create misleading impressions about the sociolinguistic situation in the U.S. (Author/AM)

No relation between composition "dialect" and judged quality of the writing was found. (DD)

Describes experiences in a Black English course in which teacher and students mounted the charge of making schooling relevant and useful when they decided to mobilize on behalf of a Black classmate whose unarmed brother was killed by white policemen in Brooklyn, New York. (JOW)

Finds that words written in dialect are difficult for black students to comprehend while reading silently, which does not agree with previously advanced hypotheses by other researchers. (RB)

Is Black English a true language form? A history of its development was discussed with suggestions for language teachers and school systems in meeting the language needs of the black student. (RK)

This introduction to African American English (AAE) looks at the grammar as a whole, describing patterns in sentence structure, sound system, word formation, and word use in AAE. The book uses linguistic description and data from conversation to explain that AAE is not a compilation of random deviations from mainstream English but rather a…

This paper presents materials used in a "short course" on using Ebonics and bilingual code switching to facilitate clarification interactions in communication classrooms and multicultural public speaking. After beginning with a detailed agenda for the two-and-a-half hour short course, the paper presents seven speech communication…