Notes that familiarity with the language of students--and especially awareness of the features of their languages that make acquisition of educated English difficult--enables the teacher to use a variety of techniques. Suggests that tolerance and acceptance of a panoply of dialects is a must, not a choice. (RS)

Discusses the close relationship between historical linguistics and dialectology, pointing out, through analysis and reconstruction of Taiwanese dialects, that the tasks of dialectologists do not stop at the making of linguistic atlases and must go beyond those tasks to reconstruct the proto-forms. (two references) (Author/CB)

Investigated African American Vernacular English dialect features in the midwestern community of Davenport, Iowa, and compared them to those reported by Pollock and Berni (1997) for Memphis, Tennessee--specifically productions of vocalic and postvocalic /r/ across African-American speakers from Davenport and Memphis. (Author/VWL)

Historical and contemporary perceptions of the African American child are based on his or her relationship to his family in general and to his or her mother in particular. This article critically reviews flawed premises constructed by outsiders looking into the African American family. These premises have shaped the education and social place…

Thirty years after its publication, Geneva Smitherman's seminal work, "Talkin and Testifyin" continues to influence scholars, policymakers and practitioners. This article takes a look at Smitherman's work by first providing an overview of the sociolinguistic theoretical foundations that led to its publication. This is followed by a reception…

Listeners are faced with enormous variation in pronunciation, yet they rarely have difficulty understanding speech. Although much research has been devoted to figuring out how listeners deal with variability, virtually none (outside of sociolinguistics) has focused on the source of the variation itself. The current experiments explore whether…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how an instructor's accent influences students' learning achievement. Furthermore, this study also explored how students' accent preference may affect their learning. Unlike native voices, accented voices were not natural to the native speakers; therefore, it required more cognitive resources for…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Subjective judgments are useful in linguistic studies to supplement information from objective language data, enlarge our knowledge of public conceptions of social speech communities (such as Negro speech), provide techniques for discussion of social markedness of standard and nonstandard varieties of English, and provide techniques for…

This annotated bibliography provides information concerning audiovisual aids available for use in teaching and teacher training in language variation. A variety of topics are covered, including regional dialect studies, language change, language acquisition, social dialects, and language in education. Each entry includes the name of the product,…

No evidence was found to indicate that grammatical reading interference is an important factor in the poor reading achievement of Black youngsters. (JH)

Two studies on the phonology of Spanish spoken by Cubans in the United States are critically analyzed. The studies are: "Markedness and a Cuban Dialect of Spanish," by Jorge M. Guitart, and "Some Theoretical Implications from Rapid Speech Phenomena in Miami-Cuban Spanish," by Robert M. Hammond. The methodologies of Hammond and Guitart are…

The use of computers makes possible analysis of the vast amount of data available in recent dialect dictionaries and surveys and in the ancient Chinese rhyme books, such as "Guang yun" and "Ji yun." Comparison of dialects can enable a historical study of Chinese, a major language group outside the Indo-European area, to offer…

This study examines the use of the auxiliaries "avoir" and "etre" and of the prefix "re-" in the speech of Franco-Ontarian students. It is found that the tendency to use non-standard constructions such as "j'ai arrive en retard" and "je vais remettre la roue 'back'" has its origins in historical…

Social dialect is demonstrated as an important factor in the low performance of Black children on language based academic achievement tests. The dialect measure accounted for a substantial percentage of the variance in reading and spelling while the IQ measure and social attitude accounted for a negligible amount of variance in these areas. The…