After describing a variety of compensatory programs that have not been very successful for children who enter school speaking nonstandard dialects, the author describes a bidialectal program that teaches standard usage as "school language" but accepts nonstandard dialects as "everyday language," and makes the differences…

Of the various theories about how to treat black dialects, the approach by way of appreciating dialect differences is now in favor. (JH)

This paper reviews research about how speaking a dialect can influence students' writing and how writing should be taught to students who speak a dialect of English. Literature on the writing errors commonly made by speakers of Black English and other American dialects is summarized. (PP)

As part of the development of a self-teaching program for instructing teachers of English and elementary language arts about dialects, a comprehensive search of the literature on dialects and dialect learning, from 1960 to the present, was made. This paper sets forth some of the major ideas, points of view, and recommendations revealed by the…

Purpose: Research has established that African American (AA) children are lagging behind other children in their reading skills. A number of factors have been proposed to account for the literacy gap; however no single factor has entirely explained this disparity. This investigation examined the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Test-Fourth…

Research in multilingual classrooms demonstrates education as a key site within which social and linguistic values are shaped. This study extends such research by investigating language use in a Scottish primary classroom. Scots is widely spoken throughout Scotland, figuring in a 2003 Scottish Parliament report as one of two indigenous heritage…

This experiment tested the effects of racial group membership, race of experimenter, and dialect on recall in 4-year-olds. The findings indicated that whites outperformed blacks in standard English, blacks outperformed whites in black vernacular, and both performed better in their own vernacular. (JMB)

During a teacher training seminar in Ecuador in 1973, a survey was conducted among the participants to gather information about attitudes toward Spanish dialects, about the criteria on which judgements are based, and about curriculum priorities. (KM)

Instruction was initiated in 1968, in isolated attempts, and gained recognition only in 1974 by virtue of the Deixonne Law. The present state of the efforts, and problems engendered by dialectal differences, orthography, lack of materials, teacher preparation, and disparity of student levels are detailed. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

Introduces a series of articles; explains the significance of these heterogeneous languages and their teaching as they relate to the French language and as they contribute to or gain from linguistic study. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO ANALYZE THE SOCIAL CAUSES FOR THE DIFFERENTIAL RATE OF CHANGE IN LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR BETWEEN BRAHMINS AND NON-BRAHMINS. INDICATIONS ARE THAT (1) INDIAN SPEECH COMMUNITIES ARE CONSCIOUS OF CASTE DIALECTS, (2) LINGUISTIC FORMS DIFFUSE MORE RAPIDLY AMONG LOWER-STATUS GROUPS, (3) THE SPEECH OF LOWER-STATUS GROUPS DISPLAYS FORMS…

The bidialectal freshman handbook will be the next gimmick of textbook companies, even though they will contain nothing new and will foster several fallacies. The information will be questionable, factually inaccurate and unsound because while no linguist has really been able to define dialect, linguists claim to have knowledge about the structure…

This study aimed to collect further evidence of written Black English markers by listing in categories those appearing in diagnostic compositions of black freshmen in a predominantly white community college, calculating their frequencies, and relating their appearance to background information about the writers. Compositions of the 72 subjects…

Thirty Black and Anglo kindergarten children from lower and middle income neighborhoods were asked to respond to three different tasks in an effort to investigate seven phonological and syntactical features of Black English and to determine the utility of each elicitation procedure. The interviews consisted of three production tasks which required…