Purpose: Research has established that African American (AA) children are lagging behind other children in their reading skills. A number of factors have been proposed to account for the literacy gap; however no single factor has entirely explained this disparity. This investigation examined the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Test-Fourth…

Research in multilingual classrooms demonstrates education as a key site within which social and linguistic values are shaped. This study extends such research by investigating language use in a Scottish primary classroom. Scots is widely spoken throughout Scotland, figuring in a 2003 Scottish Parliament report as one of two indigenous heritage…

Assessed the speed with which children who were speakers of black nonstandard English responded appropriately to sentences presented in their dialect as compared to standard English. Also investigated two grammatical features that differ in standard and nonstandard dialect. Subjects were 96, 5- and 7-year-olds. (Author/SDH)

This is a supplementary dictionary of the Spanish spoken by Chicanos in the states of Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida. The nearly 8,000 entries represent a compilation of Chicano words and phrases not typically found in standard dictionaries. Items are listed alphabetically in Spanish, followed by an English…

Spanish spoken in Mexico City is influenced considerably more by indigenous dialects than by archaic or present usage of peninsular Spanish. Six areas in particular fall under this influence: (1) the phoneme "s", treated as a palative and fricative sound, (2) voiced "s", which is dental alveolar and affricate, (3) "t"…

The phenomenon of "cross-code ambiguity" is offered as one explanation of the persistence of such Negro Nonstandard English (NNE) sentences as "The man he did it." In NNE the string "The man did it" is felt to be ambiguous, referring to either "The man who did it..." or, as in Standard English (SE), "The man did it." The use here of the pleonastic…

This study was designed to investigate, describe, and compare the intonation patterns of Black English and Standard English speaking children in a reading (formal) and free discourse (informal) situation. Black English was defined as the linguistic code of the subjects sampled from the inner city black poverty area schools, and Standard English as…

This study examined whether dialect background interferes with the comprehension of school material due to structural and phonological differences and whether reading or listening is a more efficient mode for presentation of school material. The population of 304 black male adolescents was randomly assigned to four groups, and seven passages of…

Two lower socioeconomic groups (one black and one white) from the inner city and a third group of white children from a middle socioeconomic suburban area of Chicago were studied to delineate and compare the usage of selected language structures among children of different social and ethnic backgrounds. Usage of each of the test structures was…

The purpose of this study was to examine how two different speech varieties used during an oral reading and recall task influenced primary grade teachers' evaluations of reading comprehension and how teachers' attitudes toward Black English related to their evaluations. (Author/PN)

Revised version of a paper presented at the TESOL Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, March 1971. (VM)

Discusses reasons why standard English instruction should be delayed. (DS)

Several focal points for southwestern American Indian English research are proposed. This variation is used on reservations or in urban Indian enclaves when the "Indianness" of the discussion or participants needs formal linguistic marking. One research goal is to demonstrate that tribal varieties of Indian English actually exist.…

The influence of the socioeconomic background and sex of the child and the race of the clinician on the frequency of implementation of nonstandard phonological and grammatical structures was examined in 72 black 4-and 5-year-olds. In order to generalize findings to typical clinical settings, language samples were elicited by 3 black and 3 white…

This article, primarily a critical review of Wayne O'Neil's study "The Politics of Bidialectalism," defines and examines sociological and pedagogical implications of the concepts of bidialectalism and biloquilism. It is argued that any definition of bidialectalism which refers to linguistic differentiation on the basis of social class is…