Recent scholarship in sociolinguistics and language education has examined how race and language intersect each other and how racism influences linguistic and educational practices. While racism is often conceptualized in terms of individual and institutional injustices, a critical examination of another form of racism--epistemological…

A research project combining ethnographic and experimental methods is currently underway to assess whether minority groups use language in ways that put their children at a disadvantage in school. The project, which focuses on social, cognitive, and educational consequences of different patterns of language function and use, has involved…

To determine what positive benefits to school learning might accrue from competence in Black English, a study explored the hypothesis that the rich and varied experience that black youth typically have with figurative language outside of school would enhance their understanding of figurative language in school texts. Subjects included 157 black…

Revised version of paper appearing in: F. Williams (editor), Language and Poverty: Perspectives on a Theme," Chicago, Markham, 1970. Interprets differences in child language associated with class as a systematic difference in choice of linguistic options as a function of the situation as perceived by the child. (JM)

Children's use of conjunctions was examined for linguistic complexity, developmental differences, and ethnic differences. Third, sixth, and ninth grade Anglo-American, Black, and Hispanic students completed sentence fragments ending in "and,""but,""because," and "even though." These conjunctions can be…

Interviews given 75 black job-seekers by the State employment service of a large midwestern city were examined. Each job-seeker was interviewed once each by a black and a white interviewer. On 6 measures of language elaboration, black interviewers elicited more elaboration than white interviewers. (RJ)

An investigation is reported which was designed to determine to what extent second generation male West Indians have accommodated to local white speech norms in the city of Cardiff. (RM)

This study examines, through the use of a group screening instrument, the oral language comprehension skills of elementary school children. The screening instrument was composed of 60 experimental sentences of varying syntactic complexity. Each sentence contained a specific function word or combination of function words which conveyed a direction…

A study examined the match between the vocabularies of children of different ethnic and socioeconomic status groups and the school vocabulary revealed by readability formulas and word lists. The Spache 1040 and the Dale 769 readability formula word lists were used as indicators of school vocabulary in the early primary grades, and a corpus of talk…

Six judges evaluated 20 randomly selected essays from a remedial writing program at the University of Houston to study racial differences in writing and the reasons for such differences. The judges, who were not informed of the race of the writers, examined the essays for the following writing features: free associations, redundancy (ineffective…

Presents arguments concerning the linguistic assimilation of Blacks (West Indians) in Britain, and the research methodology used to examine this issue. One argument holds that the studies' designs are flawed, allowing a false interpretation that Blacks are linguistically assimilated; the other argument upholds the research findings. (WAS)

Discusses the problems of the researcher versus the researched; the unfulfilled promises of research; the dangers of knowing; the misassessment and misinterpretation of facts by scholars; and, the inadequate research design. (JM)

This paper, one of a group prepared by the Classroom Interaction Project of the University of Missouri's Center of Social Behavior (see related documents AL 002 750-752), is organized into two parts. The first section, a presentation of results of research into the sociolinguistic distribution of syntactic structures in black and white classrooms,…