Recent experimental work in teaching standard English to speakers of nonstandard dialects of English has shown that such speakers often have a good receptive command of the standard dialect, and readily re-encode stimuli presented in the standard dialect into their own nonstandard forms. This fact shows that some modification is needed in the…

Equally divided by sex, grade level, and socioeconomic status, 360 subjects were used in two major experiments. Experiment 1 (Sentence Recall) attempted to answer three questions: (1) What are some of the developmental differences between standard and nonstandard speech? (2) To what extent are these differences sex and social class bound? (3) To…

This paper empirically examines one aspect of Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of educational failure, a code thesis wherein a restricted code is defined as giving access only to "particularistic" meanings and an elaborated code is defined as giving access also to "universalistic" meanings. According to Bernstein,…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…