Reviews Corson's book on changes in educational strategies intended for immigrant girls, aboriginal peoples, urban poor, and language minority groups, and the way educators value student groups differently. Considers classroom suggestions for dealing with bias against nonstandard language use and the book's examination on differences in the…

Examines how a group of continental Francophone African youth at a French high school in Ottawa, Canada "become Black" as they enter a world that already constructs them as Black. These students learn Black English, which they access in hip-hop culture and linguistic styles. Discusses the impact of becoming Black on…

Presents literary reviews that reveal deeper issues to consider when exploring beyond the surface and reflecting on the racial schisms pervading the United States. The literature examines: a conference on the relationship of education and African American self-concept; the role of black mothers in raising their sons; slave novels; a critical…

Examined relationships between adjustment and academic achievement and effects of sociocultural background on parental expectations for primary school students in Italy. Found a significant relationship between adjustment and achievement. Parents were more willing than teachers to excuse poor adjustment or behavior in a high-achieving child.…

For many black students, the school language differs significantly from the home language, but preservice education rarely examines this issue. This article examines implications for teaching children who use two different forms of language to navigate the demands of their contrasting sociolinguistic speech communities, discussing: how teacher…

This article reviews recent investigations of the development of phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics in the development of speech and language by African American children. Clinical implications are offered to aid the distinction between normal language development using features of African American English and language disorders.…

Suggests that when students improve their ability to code-switch from the local dialect (African American English) to Standard English, they improved their academic achievement, particularly in science and math. Indicates that future teachers need to be exposed to many different cultures and dialects in terms of teacher preparation. (SG)

Discusses national linguistic tensions related to the increasing number of Spanish speakers in the United States. Focuses on a group of language scholars who are engaging in efforts to change or suppress the use of U.S. Spanish, particularly in the domain of Spanish. Asserts that the arguments put forth by this group are based on attitudes of the…

This investigation examined the comprehension skills of 63 urban African-American children (ages 4-6) from middle-income homes. Performances on a task designed to elicit responses to wh-questions and another to make distinctions between active and passive sentence constructions revealed grade effects and a positive relationship to age. (Author/CR)

Describes a Danish language-attitude study, arguing that views presented in the literature often differ from people's private uncensored stereotypes. Surveys of people from four regions in Denmark investigated their attitudes after listening to voices with seven different regional dialects. Results indicated that people assigned social-class…

Six recommendations that instructors can employ to encourage effective classroom code-switching practices among Black English-speaking students in the basic communication course are discussed. These include reconsidering attitudes, communicating expectations, demonstrating model language behavior, affirming students' language, creating culturally…

Many African American students produce African American English (AAE) features that are contrastive to Standard American English (SAE). The AAE-speaking child who is able to dialect shift, that is, to speak SAE across literacy contexts, likely will perform better academically than the student who is not able to dialect shift. Method: This…

This study addresses bidialectism by investigating the linguistic situation on the bidialectal island of Cyprus where Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and the regional Cypriot dialect (CD) are both routinely used. The study implemented a language programme that embraced both sociolinguistic and educational factors and was designed to teach SMG by using…

This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria.…

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine attitudes towards African-American vernacular English (AAVE) in a setting outside of the USA. Because foreign attitudes toward AAVE can serve as an indirect assessment of a society's racial prejudice, we decided to explore these attitudes in Japan: a country with an intriguing mix of…