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…

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…

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…

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…

The Spanish dialects of the Southwest United States have received little serious attention until recently. The present volume contains studies designed to contribute to the understanding and acceptance of Southwest Spanish. The book consists of the following chapters: (1) "Linguistic Diversity in Southwest Spanish," by Garland D. Bills…

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…

The following articles are included in this anthology on Chicano speech: (1) "Mexican Spanish," D.N. Cardenas; (2) "The Archaic and the Modern in the Spanish of New Mexico," J. Ornstein; (3) "Problemas Lexicograficos del Espanol del Sudoeste," A.M. Espinosa, Jr.; (4) "Associative Interference in New Mexican Spanish," J.B. Rael; (5) "Some Aspects…

The Black English tests for students attempt to provide a complete picture of a Black child's language proficiency, including the child's relative proficiency in the standard and vernaculary forms of speech. Three different tests, which can be taken separately, are included in this manual. The "Discrimination Test" measures the ability to…

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…

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)

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)

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…

The objectives of this study were to examine a body of data collected by five graduate students at the University of Texas at San Antonio and to determine, after a careful analysis of the transcribed utterances, whether all instances of language alternations can be truly considered code-switching strategies and whether those that can be so…

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…