In this article, the author shares his experience growing up speaking African American Vernacular English in school and his observations about nonstandard American plantation English. The author's amateur linguistic observations about nonstandard American plantation English gave rise to immediate dialect comparisons between African American…

Investigates the relative effects of directing adolescents' attention, either toward the "correctness" of their speech or toward the expression of their attitudes, on the amount, fluency, and syntactic structure of speech produced in a subsequent standardized interview. (HOD)

A study of the language usage of 80 middle school students revealed no significant difference between the sexes on any measure of syntactic maturity; however, boys deviated from standard usage somewhat more frequently than did girls, and boys produced more words in oral language while girls produced more words in written language. (ET)

Examines arguments in favor of the notion of dialect interference in writing; offers counterevidence and explores an alternative explanation for apparent dialect interference in writing. Concludes that pedagogies for teaching writing skills to native speakers of English that assume dialect interference are theoretically wrong, pedagogically…