Essays on the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) include: an introduction to the evolution of AAVE within the African American diaspora (Shana Poplack); "Rephrasing the Copula: Contraction and Zero in Early African American English" (James A. Walker); "Reconstructing the Source of Early African American English…

Argues that the African's struggle to survive the racist language may be seen as psychological rejection and resistance to mastering the language, and advocates the development of a language of African Humanism. (Author/JM)

Asks Mrs. Seymour, a former teacher currently working as an editorial specialist in linguistics for an educational publisher, to comment on the standard/nonstandard dialect controversy as it relates to beginning reading instruction. (VJ)

The article discusses how semantic variations in the speech of lower socioeconomic children reflects the deprivations in their lives. (MF)

Research is reported on the degree to which the speaker characteristics of children can be related to the attitudes of teachers, in the absence, and in the presence of additional visual information about the speaker. (JM)

Expanded version of an address presented at a conference in Regensburg and at the Universities of Erlangen and Marburg. (WB)

Considers variations in linguistic forms, dialects, phonology, vocabulary, and grammar as they relate to spoken and written language, and discusses implications of linguistics for the teaching of reading. (MD)

Discusses current research in child language to help teachers understand how young children acquire language skills. (DR)

Immigrant children from the Caribbean are disadvantaged in American urban schools because they have to adjust to new situations; do not possess complex vocabularies; are not readily understood and have difficulty understanding others; come from academically deficient home backgrounds; and must balance conflicting home and school cultures.…

The purpose of this article is to briefly review recent findings on Ontarian French; to refute claims that it is not an authentic French dialect; and to examine some of the implications these findings may have for French language instruction in Ontario. (Author/SJL)

Conversational data from a native speaker of European Portuguese from the island of Faial were analyzed to determine segmental and prosodic contexts favoring unstressed vowel deletion. Factors such as rhythmic preservation, syllable structure, and functional load are discounted in the analysis, suggesting vowel deletion is essentially a word-based…