A course to make students aware of the patterns of the different dialects of American English is offered by the Dade County Public Schools. Designed to foster tolerance for other ways of speaking, the quinmester program helps students to determine their own dialect and to compare it with alternative forms of speech. The course content includes a…

In order to teach reading effectively to students who use a nonstandard dialect, the teacher must accept and understand the systems and patterns of that dialect. He can then help his students avoid the characteristics of their dialect which lead to confusion in communication, promote their accurate decoding of standard English as they learn to…

Bidialectal approaches to American public school teaching presume a relativistic view of language on the part of teachers, a requirement which has received little scrutiny since bidialectalism has become a predominant approach to divergent language in school settings. Evidence drawn from documents of the American teaching profession over the past…

The simplification of legal language is required by President Carter's Executive Order requiring "clear and simple English" in government regulations. A major problem in the simplification process is the absence of any adequate description or classification of legal language. This paper defines some specific features of legal language,…

For the beginning or general student, dialectology and the history of the English language can both be taught with a common frame of reference provided by certain principles of linguistic change. Related in obvious ways with the history of language but often overlooked in dialectology, these principles are (1) that any living language is certain…