Many tone languages exhibit some form of downdrift or automatic downstep, the lowering of high tones separated by low tones. In extreme cases, the realization of high tones at the end of a domain (such as the sentence) may be lower than the realization of low tones at the beginning. Tone languages with this property are cross-level tone languages.…

Implications of the Conference on College Composition and Communication position paper on The Students' Right to Their Own Language are considered. (JH)

The teacher of black students needs to develop a sensitivity to their rich communicative language styles in order to use the varied styles in the classroom situation. (JH)

A technique for decreasing interference between black dialect features and the hearing and production of standard English is described. (JH)

In this essay, the author suggests that recent developments in English studies and popular culture create an opportune moment for writing teachers to welcome such literature in composition curricula. The author describes how studying stories by John Edgar Wideman enabled first-year composition students to engage political and interpersonal issues…

This paper is a critical review of Eleanor Orr's theory that African American students have difficulty with mathematical and scientific concepts because they speak Black English. Orr's data are criticized on many levels. For instance, her facts are derived from a limited subject pool and she has failed to take into account other possible reasons…

Legal language is discussed in the context of concern about the comprehensibility of consumer documents and the trend toward simplification of the language used in these documents. Specific features of legal language and its functions within the legal community and society are identified. As a primary tool of the legal profession, legal language…

Recent studies of American Indian dialects of English have focused on efforts to determine whether the sources of such dialectal variation lie in interference from the native languages or in developmental errors in the acquisition of English. The implication of both assumptions is that educational intervention and the passage of time can eradicate…

A dialect of Rato-Romansh spoken in a Swiss town is examined in the context of lexical phonology. The structure of this dialect's lexicon consists of two levels defined by stress assignment, not cyclically in this case but at the end of each level. Other considerations that have been advanced as bases for level division within the lexicon, such as…

Eighty-four students in a graduate course on methods and materials for reading in the elementary school participated in a study of the effects of black dialect syntactical features on teacher judgements of reader ability. Each person listened to four tape recordings of the same 255-word passage. The recordings varied by race of reader, number of…

The stated purpose of this discussion is to examine the rationale of the language cognitive deficit model used to describe the educationally disadvantaged black -- a model which assumes that Black English lacks the organization and logic characterizing Standard Spoken English -- and to argue that the model is irrelevant to both educational…

Deals with problems related to the choice of an instructional model for the teaching of spoken English in India. A local model, Educated Indian English, is suggested as a realistic choice. (Author/RM)