Code-switching pedagogies do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. My research asserts that when teaching language/ dialect difference in majority white school settings, contrastive analysis techniques such as these may have…

The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…

The paper being reviewed puts the vernacular in the perspective of the linguistic repertoire of a speech community. It is suggested that the repertoire as a single system should be seen on a societal or individual level rather than on a linguistic level such that various codes are selected by members of the community according to socially…

There exists a need to identify and recognize the Spanish dialect used in the Southwest United States in order to change the tradition of looking at it as inferior to standard Spanish and to English. The history of the Spanish-speaking people in the Southwest and of the changes in their culture brought about by colonialism is connected with the…

This paper reports on a preliminary quantitative study of syntactic constraints on code-switching within discourses in which no change in participants, setting or topic is evident. The goals of the study are to provide a syntactic description of the points at which switches from Spanish to English and English to Spanish are possible and to assess…

Educators must begin to take folk language seriously. Many of the situations in our classrooms are set up within unrealistic language frames because teachers are intimidated by code switching and because there is too little information about when and why people switch speech styles. (Author/WI)

Describes an investigation of the nature of English dialect acquisition among bilingual Puerto Ricans. Subjects were in the sixth grade of a school in the Puerto Rican community in North Philadelphia. Results show that subjects can socially classify linguistic variants from two competing systems and use them appropriately. (Author/RM)

This paper describes research that investigated the influence of the listener on the dialectal code-switching behavior of a group of Chinese-Thai bilingual teachers. (CFM)

Discusses the major language shift in Singapore from the familial use of varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin towards the languages of education, English and Mandarin. An ethnographic study is presented of a Singaporean Chinese family that has moved from Cantonese to English, and the underlying pressures leading to this shift are examined. (19…

Analyzes an Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to mixed audience. Dialect alternants signal switching between contrasting styles in both. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings, and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and…

Presents results of a longitudinal study on long-term dialect accommodation in a German dialect setting. An important model of explaining which linguistic structures undergo such convergence and which do not makes use of the notion of "salience." (Author/VWL)

Writing teachers should consider cultural pluralism as a rich resource in their classrooms, rather than as a distraction with which to cope. Because speakers of nonstandard English have important language skills in at least two different dialects, teachers should not only teach the standard dialect but also invite nonstandard English speaking…

The assessment of teacher attitudes toward nonstandard dialects in the classroom is the major focus of this research. A Black English attitudes test was developed consisting of the "Black English Speech Varieties Attitude Test" and the "Black English Teacher Attitude Scale." The speech varieties test measures attitudes toward standard and…

This work attempts to provide an overview of linguistic diversity in South Asia and to place this diversity in a cultural context. The work tries to describe the current state of knowledge concerning socially conditioned language variation in the subcontinent. Each of five major language families contains numerous mutually intelligible and…

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…