Concepts advanced by grammarians, linguistic historians, dialectologists, psycholinguists, lexicographers, semanticists, and phonologists, together with new approaches to reading, spelling, and literature, can help the teacher make the English program more stimulating for children. For instance, discoveries made by psycholinguists have attested to…

Even in culturally homogeneous settings, language has an important role in the social interaction of adolescents. This study investigated the importance of values concerning dialect and language variation in a group of 62 ninth-grade students. Subjects, 23 black, 21 white, and 18 native Spanish-speaking individuals, were asked to listen to a tape…

Although the black poet Melvin B. Tolson is recognized and respected by other poets and critics, he is unknown both to students and to the general reading public. This paper points out that the key to understanding Tolson's poetry, and much of the poetry coming out of black America, is his use of language. The paper examines one of Tolson's major…

Based on a 1967 survey of Mexican American high school sophomores conducted in the "border region" of South Texas, this 1973 follow-up study examined the extent to which: (1) historical changes had occurred in the use of Spanish and English by Mexican American boys and girls over the 6-year study period, and (2) the variations in 1973…

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the awareness and application of Black English features by writers and producers of materials for young children which represent black characters in a fictive setting. The study was limited to materials which were available to inner city children in Cleveland, Ohio, through libraries. Fifty-three fiction…

The main research hypothesis of this study stated that when the universal characteristics of language evaluation are applied to the written language of the students in four fifth grades of varying racial composition, no significant differences would be reported. Two instruments were used: a composition and a series of six paragraphs modified by a…

This elementary reader is one of a series produced by the Alaska Native Language Center. It contains eleven stories, written in six dialects of the Tanaina language, and is designed to be used either as reading exercises by native speakers of Tanaina who are learning to read and write their language, or as lessons in Tanaina language and culture…

This study was designed to explore the role of the syntax of beginning readers' spoken language in their reading performance. In order to be able to isolate and manipulate the syntactic variable, two alternative forms of English, Standard English and Black English, were used. Sixty second-grade children participated in the study. Each child was…

Prepared as a guide to participants in a pilot Oral History Project designed to encourage the collection and preservation of personal reminiscences and histories of communities, families, and individuals as well as to gather knowledge of surviving customs, examples of folk art, folklore, and linguistic characteristics of German or other ethnic…

The fourth volume in this series contains nine contrastive studies in phonetics and phonology. They are: "Remarks on the Physical Manifestation of Internal Open Juncture in the English of Romanians," by Andrei Avram; "The Back Vowels of Romanian and English--A Contrastive Study," by Laurentia Dascalu; "Remarks on the English Diphthongs and…

This paper presents an investigation of elementary teachers' attitudes toward Black dialects, and an analysis of these expressed attitudes in terms of specific variables--sex, age, race, and educational background. Further analyses dealt with racial balance in the class, grade level taught and perceived socioeconomic background of the pupils.…

This experimental program in oral English at the Ector High School in Odessa, Texas is designed primarily to help the minority group, disadvantaged, high school student who is a potential dropout. During the three weeks of orientation, 97 students were introduced to the daily metropolitan newspaper which served as the stimulus material and were…

The sociolinguistic research described here was carried out in connection with the bilingual education program for Navajo children by Consultants in Teaching English (CITE) for the Navajo Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. CITE's first curriculum objective is to encourage children to learn to use three distinct media: the Navajo language; the…

This paper, one of a group prepared by the Classroom Interaction Project of the University of Missouri's Center of Social Behavior (see related documents AL 002 750-752), is organized into two parts. The first section, a presentation of results of research into the sociolinguistic distribution of syntactic structures in black and white classrooms,…

Although technical and social engineering and planning have made tremendous progress, an almost prescientific attitude regarding language planning still prevails in some linguistic circles. (Language planning is defined here as the "methodical activity of regulating and improving existing languages or creating new common regional, national or…