American education has always considered the non-standard or sub-standard form of speech used by children to be an imperfect copy of standard English. The defects of this approach have now become a matter of urgent concern in the face of the tremendous educational problems of the urban ghettos. This paper reverses the usual focus and looks…

What has been labelled mainstream dialectology has been criticized soundly on theoretical grounds, yet mainstream dialectologists have responded with the assertion that their critics have not been intimately familiar with dialect methodology and are therefore not qualified to criticize. Claiming that while theoretical issues are far from being…

This description of Appalachian speech, derived from one part of the final report of a research project on Appalachian Dialects, is intended as a reference work for educators, particularly reading specialists, English teachers, language arts specialists, and speech pathologists. Chapters deal with the following main topics: (1) a sociolinguistic…

This collection of studies in contrastive linguistics includes the following: "Bilingual Intralinguistic Orthographic Interference" (Philip A. Luelsdorff); "Reassociation of Sentence Melodies" (Wolfgang U. Dressler, Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi); "English Word Stress and Empty Vowel Slots" (Grazyna Rowicka);…