Many English language arts teachers consider the nonstandard English of their students as being "slovenly or nonverbal or inexact or lazy." These same teachers often have been trained in the "false assumptions of a single universally accepted norm of English." These positions, the author states, are both fallacious and…

This volume is a report of the methodology employed by the Detroit Dialect Study staff in their survey of Detroit speech, 1966-67. As a study of one approach to sociolinguistic fieldwork, this report is descriptive rather than theoretical "in order to provide a practical basis for large-scale urban language study." The authors discuss…

This is a bibliography of post-graduate theses on language and linguistics in Irish university libraries, from 1915 to 1976. The 537 entries are listed by author and indexed by subject and language. In addition, each entry contains the following information: degree, year, and university. An appendix contains theses completed outside of Ireland…

This annotated bibliography of recent studies on language variation presents abstracts which appeared in "Resources in Education" during the period September 1973 through December 1974. They include entries from several of the ERIC clearinghouses: Adult Education, Reading and Communication Skills, Languages and Linguistics, Early…

The term "Regional Standard English" should refer to any kind of English spoken by educated individuals in a particular region. Vernacular is spoken by individuals with little education. Sociolinguistics as a field embraces ethnography of communication, social coding, societal analysis, social-psychological analysis and anthropoloty, all…

The aim of the research reported here was to describe dialect diversity in Appalachia (Monroe and Mercer Counties, West Virginia) and to examine the possible effect of this diversity on education. The present volume contains the first two parts of the report, the third being submitted separately. The first part includes chapters 1-5, the second…

This bulletin reports on condensations of tape-recorded lectures and discussions from a workshop which trained a nucleus of Baltimore City Public School personnel in new approaches to the study of the English language. Designed to serve as an orientation, it is made up of six major sections: (1) Charlton Laird discusses the history, nature, and…

This section of a four-part research project investigating the syntax of Brazilian Portuguese presents data concerning tense usage in verb distribution. The data are derived from the analysis of selected literary samples from representative and contemporary writers. The selection of authors and tabulation of data are also described. Materials…

Volume 3 of the Russian Dialect Studies is a bibliography listing Russian dialect studies published in the 19th and 20th centuries in Russia and abroad. The selection has been oriented primarily toward phonological and morphological studies of the dialects, and secondarily toward lexical, syntactic, and other studies. The bibliography is also…

Two studies are discussed in this research report, which was presented at the 1973 American Educational Research Association meeting. The first study investigated whether black children would evaluate Black English selections more favorably than standard English selections and whether favorable evaluation would lead to greater comprehension of the…

The purpose of this research was to begin to refute the deficit approach to the verbal abilities of poor children. The contention was that data collected on poor children's verbal abilities had been done in incorrect social situations. Prior research had indicated that language development is innate and that disadvantaged children will be…

Analyzes an Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to mixed audience. Dialect alternants signal switching between contrasting styles in both. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings, and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and…

Supports a greater use of repeated recordings and elicited intuitions by sociolinguists in assessing the linguistic competence of individuals or groups. A replication of an earlier implicational analysis of pronominal variation in the Guyanese creole continuum shows that, with repeated sampling and the inclusion of elicited intuitions, the…

Reviews the current state of World English. Subjects addressed include standard accents and dialects, prejudicial attitudes toward nonstandard "local" usages, the use of English as the language of diplomacy, American influences on the language, and the fracturing of English in non-English-speaking countries around the world. (17 references) (JL)

Presents results of a longitudinal study on long-term dialect accommodation in a German dialect setting. An important model of explaining which linguistic structures undergo such convergence and which do not makes use of the notion of "salience." (Author/VWL)