This study was concerned with the presentation of character in children's books set in the southeastern United States. Thirty-six books of realistic fiction, recommended by authors of six college-level children's textbooks, were analyzed in terms of characters and methods of characterization. Among the findings of the study were the following: (1)…

The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of a sample of black teachers toward the use of dialect reading materials for teaching beginning reading skills to black children. An interview-questionnaire method was used to gather data about the attitudes toward dialect-specific materials, using a sample of 90 black teachers in the Lansing…

This study compares the oral reading performance of Black English (BE) speaking children, bilingual Mexican American (MA) children, and Standard English (SE) speaking children who were average third grade readers. Reading performance was evaluated by a system-oriented analysis of reading errors, of recall, and of reading speed. For the reading…

The purpose of this dissertation was to see if dialect and socioeconomic status affected the spelling strategies used by second grade children. A list of 18 low frequency words representing the lax and tense forms of a, e, and i were administered each month for five months. The spellings were assigned a score of 1-4 corresponding to the strategy…

The purposes of this study were to analyze the pronunciation of pupils and teachers to determine the deviation from the expected pronunciation for each group, and to determine the influence of dialect on reading performance of pupils. A random sample of 20 first grade pupils and 20 elementary teachers from four small, rural, all-white elementary…