Background/Context: Although progress has been made since members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed the Students' Right to Their Own Language resolution (1974), there still remains a demand to examine youth perceptions of language. Such examinations can help teachers and researchers improve curricular choices, honor…

Suggests that Ebonics deserves respect as a genuine spoken dialect, widely used and important in American culture. Notes that students who are fluent in it benefit when they are allowed to add standard English to their repertoire and taught the appropriate occasions for each way of speaking. (RS)

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a number of syntactic phenomena in modern English, specifically but not exclusively in British English, that can be characterized as urban/suburban near-standard usage. These phenomena are representative of a type of feature that has to date received relatively little attention from linguists. One…

Paper read at the American Educational Research Association Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1970. Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (DS)

This essay notes that the book under review is primarily a popular translation of research in the area of vernacular black English (VBE) that presents a relatively non-technical discussion of the linguistic characteristics of VBE and their educational implications. (Author/AM)

The controversy holding back the project is what approach should be used in data collecting, controlled interviews or spontaneous recordings. The author favors the latter. To be scientific, the analysis of the data should be psycholinguistic rather than stylistic. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

This paper offers a brief but comprehensive overview of various issues pertaining to the use and origins of Black English. The purpose of the paper is to help educators understand Black English and celebrate this dialect in class while facilitating the acquisition of Standard English. It holds that Ebonics is a dialect of English with its own set…

Originally appeared in Workpapers: Teaching English as a Second Language," Volume 5 (June 1971), Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, California. (VM)

Based in part on a presentation at the Conference on Symbolic Processes in Akron, Ohio, October 1970. (VM)

This study explored whether statistically significant differences exist between the (1) grammatical structures produced by high, average, and low black, inner-city elementary readers as measured by a language competency task; and (2) whether statistically significant interactions occur between reading achievement levels and the age of the child,…

The goal of instruction in standard spoken usage should not be to modify the student's language behavior by rejecting his nonstandard dialect, but to work with him to expand his competencies on the base of his present linguistic competence. (JM)

The stated intent of this book is to "contribute to the development of more socially aware and more linguistically oriented classroom teachers and to provide these teachers with methods for implementing their new awareness." Four sections provide chapters that discuss various aspects of the phenomenon of dialect clash. A historical…

In language learning, the psychological factor of group reference is crucial. In its absence, the best efforts of the English teacher are ineffective. In its presence, nonstandard dialect speakers will learn standard English regardless of formal teaching. (JM)

When children (particularly African Americans) have a different orthography, phonemic system, and deep structure from Standard American English (SAE) speakers, they may have difficulty grasping the correct SAE phonemes represented by the symbols and reading in general. Language acquisition is natural learning centered around the interaction of…