This study demonstrated that black first grade children from disadvantaged backgrounds understood a Black English version of a story better than an equivalent Standard English version. The testing was done in South Georgia. The story was "peer-prepared," that is, it was a story told by a black child about his own experiences and in his own words.…

Morphological features in the speech of Southern white and Negro students at four grade levels were studied by an instrument designed to test the students' knowledge of fifteen inflectional endings (including the allomorphs of the regular plural, singular possessive and third person singular present, absence of the plural possessive, and the…

This booklet comments on the second dialect teaching situation with special emphasis given to the role of the native dialect, the definition of the standard dialect, special factors affecting the pupil, teaching methodology, and teacher training. The first section examines dialects associated with the influence of a specific foreign language,…

The first section of this report consists of papers given at the two-day conference on social dialects at the Center for Applied Linguistics, October 1969: (1) "Social Dialects and the Field of Speech" by F. Williams, with response by O. Taylor; (2) "Approaches to Social Dialects in Early Childhood Education" by C. B. Cazden, with response by R.…

This study sought to determine (1) what attitudes black children have at the primary level, fifth grade, and eighth grade regarding dialects sometimes different from their own, and (2) what cues children use in identifying the race or ethnic background of taped speakers. An audio tape was made of thirteen speakers retelling Aesop's Fables. The…

Psycholinguistics has offered many new insights into the development of reading, e.g., only a small part of the information necessary for reading comprehension comes from the printed page, comprehension must precede the identification of individual words, and reading is not decoding to spoken language. These views are elaborated in this collection…

Research, pedagogical implications for reading, and the exploration of issues surrounding social dialects and reading are addressed in this annotated bibliography. Criteria for choosing the articles include (1) that all American children and teachers whose first language is English speak a dialect of American English; (2) that all dialects of…

This study investigated some characteristics of intonation patterns in the English spoken by black adolescents in Seattle, Washington. It was hypothesized that if intonation is central to communicating attitude, and if Black English intonation differs systematically from that of Standard English, communication between blacks and whites may be…

This study compared the use of oral language of children who had participated in a Head Start program with that of children with no preschool experience. Of the 43 children enrolled in Project Uplift, 25 were Afro-American, one was Anglo-American, and seventeen were Mexican-American. It was found that Head Start participation for the groups…

Any reputable approach to the teaching of reading makes use of certain psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic concepts which can provide the teacher with insights for the development and strengthening of reading skills. An understanding of the respect for the learner's cultural and behavioral patterns can establish group empathy, instrumental as a…

Some 26 abstracts of papers presented at the Conference are compiled in this report. Topics include papers by noted specialists on: (1) programed language instruction (2) Milivox, (3) individualized instruction, (4) Spanish phonetics, (5) linguistic analysis, (6) semantics, (7) the comparative in English, (8) inflectional and derivational…

Studies of the speech of 11 Yakima Indian children on a reservation in central Washington indicated a number of characteristics which were not found systematically in the speech of non-Indian children. These included differences in phonology; intonation contours; use of direct quotations; story-telling register; language play; availability of…

In order to better understand the characteristics of the Chicano dialect of English, 93 freshman composition papers written by 48 Chicano students at Pan American University in Edinburg, Texas, were examined. The primary concern of this examination was to categorize, ultimately to explain, the morphological and syntactical variations from a norm.…

At present, there is virtually no empirical evidence of the success of educational techniques designed to minimize the interference of black English on the acquisition of reading skills. The 180 black, inner-city third and fifth graders who participated in this study were selected in order to determine whether the discrepancy between performance…

Articles focused on speech prejudice and how to overcome it, a reading program that stressed student interests, a learning experience in which elementary students designed a small zoo, and suggestions for developing nonverbal communication between students and their teachers. (RK)