Arguing that dialect interference in writing does not exist, this paper contends that pedagogies for teaching writing skills to native speakers of English that assume such interference are wrong. It examines arguments and evidence that support the notion of dialect interference in writing, offers counter evidence, and explores an alternative…

APPROPRIATE ENGLISH USAGE SHOULD NOT BE DETERMINED BY RIGID AND ARTIFICAL REGULATIONS SET UP BY SCHOLARS MORE INTERESTED IN DEMONSTRATING THEIR OWN SUPERIORITY THAN IN DESCRIBING THE WAY LANGUAGE IS ACTUALLY USED. INSTEAD, GOOD ENGLISH SHOULD REVEAL ITSELF AS "THE PRODUCT OF CUSTOM" AND SHOULD CHANGE WITH "THE ORGANIC LIFE OF THE LANGUAGE." THUS,…

Numerous reasons can be cited by scholars concerning lexical problems that face anyone embarking upon such an enterprise as that of preparing a Basque-English dictionary. First, "euskera," a term given to this ancient tongue, is both written and spoken today as it was millennia ago. Second, Basque, as a result, has not been subjected to…

This document contains the papers presented at the 1966-67 annual midwinter meeting of the School and College Conference on English. The titles and authors are: "A Report on the Urban Language Study Project" by J. L. Dillard; "Creolized American English, Some Problems and Solutions" by Melvin J. Fox; "Recent Changes in…

This four-part study, which focused on the relationship between the incidence of Black English and the child's perception that Black English is not preferred speech, identified the phonological characteristics in the dialect speech of black second grade children of low socioeconomic background in New York City public schools. Specifically, the…

This study compares the oral reading performance of Black English (BE) speaking children, bilingual Mexican American (MA) children, and Standard English (SE) speaking children who were average third grade readers. Reading performance was evaluated by a system-oriented analysis of reading errors, of recall, and of reading speed. For the reading…

One way of meeting the goals of the English composition course, both humanistic and pragmatic, is through a combination of individualized instruction and focus on selected aspects of linguistics. Individualized instruction, using in-class tutors and writing notebooks, allows for a variety of activities that make better use of the scheduled class…

Two groups of children in grades 3 and 4 (80 lower-socioeconomic Negro children whose native speech dialect was Negro nonstandard English and 80 middle-class white children whose native dialect was standard English) were given two 50-item cloze reading comprehension tests to determine the effect of native speech dialect and written language…

This paper first considers the inadequacy of definitions of dialect speech that are too rigid. Some of the ways in which dialect can influence the performance of children in school are discussed, and the notion that dialect is an indication of linguistic deficit is also considered. In the last part of the paper, the attitude of the Schools Council…

The syntactic and semantic constraints on the occurrence of HAVE-GOT and GOT, each with the meaning "possess," are analyzed with respect to differences among several ethnic dialects: American Anglo and Black English, British English, and Mexican-American and Puerto Rican English. Data from three sets of interviews which elicited these verbs are…

The three experiments reported in this document are all concerned with high school students' use of Black English. For the first experiment, the hypothesis was that lessons in grammar would aid speakers of Black English in developing competence in standard English. Results of this experiment were inconclusive. The second experiment showed that…

The introductory section of this study of Spanish dialects in the United States, commissioned by the ERIC Clearinghouse for Linguistics, presents the plan and the ethnic distribution of Spanish speakers in the U.S.. (The 1960 census shows the preponderance of population contribution to be from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Spain.) A description…

The present paper reviews recent research in the area of nonstandard English: the major results to date, the significance of this research for education, and suggestions for further research. The notion of "standard" English resists precise definition; there is not a simple set of linguistic features which can be said to define it. The term…

The present study of Vaagri Boli is the first attempt to record this spoken language "systematically." The author defines Vaagri Boli, the language of the migratory Narikkorvas/Kuruvikkarans in Tamil Nadu, as a member of an inner subgroup of Indo Aryan languages. Following a brief description of the cultural characteristics of the…

The object of this study was to develop a model from which Appalachian students can learn to differentiate between their dialectal pronunciation of certain vowels and the pronunciation of those vowels in Standard American English. A secondary objective of the model is to enable students to imitate Standard American pronunciation. The first phase…