Linguistic interference as a key factor in the acquisition of reading skills by inner-city black children is explored. Examples of syntactic and phonetic structures in the black dialect which are different from standard English and the role these differences play in beginning reading are given. The use of dialect-based texts allows the child to…

Paper read at the National Council of Teachers of English meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 28, 1970. (DS)

This book presents some language studies which have been conducted with children from lower socioeconomic and minority groups over the past four years (1972-1976). These and other studies indicate that children who live in poverty can succeed in school and that, when these children do not succeed, it is due more to a failure of the school to…

The paper examines interpretive aspects of English non-uniformity among fifth and sixth grade Native Americans at Laguna Elementary School, Laguna, New Mexico. Speaker assessments of instances of uninflected "be" are ordered to form an implicational scale. The variability in the students' assessment pattern is compared to previous inter-ethnic…

This selected bibliography on language learners' systems and error analysis is divided into five section. Section 1 deals with the notion of approximative or intermediate systems and interlanguage, and with more classical studies on contrastive analysis. Section 2 focuses on the concept and definition of learner errors and includes items dealing…

The paper focuses on the linguistic behavior of Negro children concentrated in communities where a non-standard form of English is the accepted currency. Such children are verbal, possess a language fully developed to serve the needs of their "world," and think effectively enough to survive in a sometimes hostile environment. Certain basic…