For educators committed to promoting social equity, the question of how to address dialect hegemony is increasingly important. While linguists have long accepted the concept of dialect equality, educators have struggled with the issue, sparking a history of controversy and debate underscoring larger social issues of diversity and equity. For…

This volume brings together research carried out in a variety of geographic and linguistic contexts including Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States and explores efforts to incorporate linguistic diversity into education and to "harness" this diversity for learners' benefit. It challenges the largely…

This paper examines the written English of Chicano freshman composition students and presents a contrastive analysis of the written English of the hypothetical college freshman, which approximates "standard" English, and the written English of 93 Chicano freshmen. Discussion focuses on various linguistic differences, classified in the…

Comparative research indicates that almost without exception, late eighteenth century non-standard English pronunciation was very close to what is called Broad Australian. Present Australian English is closely akin to the blended, popular colloquial London English, spoken by the largest group of Australia's first settlers. This pronunciation…

In a study of Negro children's listening comprehension, conducted in 1969, the following hypotheses were tested: (1) Beginning first-grade Negro dialect speakers who scored high, average, and low on readiness tests show no significant differences in their ability to answer literal comprehension questions about stories presented orally in standard…

This study considers the occurrence of noun plural marker deletion in black English. It questions the cause of the phenomenon and investigates four factors which could be involved: presence or absence of a quantifier expression, phonological constraints, age of the speaker, and interaction between quantifier expressions and phonological…

Sociolinguistic studies of spoken Arabic show at least three varieties at different levels of prestige: (1) Modern Standard Arabic (MSA); (2) regional standard with local prestige; and (3) vernacular varieties. The social function of the local prestigious nonstandard features can override the influence of the prestige of MSA. (Author/LMO)

This paper considers the problem of teaching formal composition skills to those whose repertories lack formal standard speaking style. The approach advocated here is bidialectal and is based on the idea that control of a variety of language styles is a useful tool and that productive competence of formal composition style is a mandatory skill for…

Dialect analysis should follow the procedure for analysis of a new language: collection of a corpus of words, stories, and sentences and identifying structural features of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Contrastive analysis between standard English and the native language is used and the ethnic dialect of English is described and…

This study in 1969-70 investigated morphological proficiency in relation to race, intelligence, and sex in a lower class rural kindergarten population in Florida. Subjects (145), Negro and white, male and female, were grouped in terms of high-, middle-, or low-intelligence using raw scores on a portion of the Kuhlmann-Anderson Intelligence Test.…

The English spoken by second generation Puerto Ricans in Harlem is influenced by black English heard in the surrounding community, standard English used in the school, and the Spanish-influenced English used by the first generation Puerto Rican community. The study of these influences is conducted according to recently developed sociolinguistic…

The effect of processing information in standard and nonstandard English was investigated using an equivalent standard and nonstandard English passage as the stimulus. Eight literal and eight inferential questions derived from the passage were used as the index of comprehension. Two hundred Black students were randomly assigned by class to one of…

Papers presented at a 1977 symposium on language acquisition held at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee are included. Contents are as follows: "Assumptions, Methods and Goals in Language Acquisition Research" (Sheldon); "The Mother as LAD: Interaction between Order and Frequency of Parental Input and Child Production"…