Use of Relational Concepts by Inner-City Children.

........................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................ iv List of Tables ............................................................................................................................. vii

The Sounds of Social Change: Phonology and Identity in Elba, Alabama

A Report on Montana-Washington Implicational Research

clearly indicate that black English and white English are involved in the education of black children. Black children do not speak two dialects. They speak black English, not white English. When black children try to use white English, there is interference from black English. LIN;UIST C: Traditionally, schools have understood that part of their task is to get pupils to speak and write properly. \"Properly\" is defined as whatever it is that characterizes the language of the white, middle class. The schools have not been successful in this endeavor. Some pupils assimilate proper speech ways, but most of them go on speaking, a bit nervously after their school experience, the way they would speak had schools never been invented, just as they go on avoiding the plays, the books, and the art that schools concern themselves with-a bit nervous about that, too. EDUCATOR A: Standard English is the only language that should be taught in the schools. No attempt should be made to preserve native dialects, except perhaps as exotic primitive languages. Those who would preserve black English are consigning blacks to perpetual inferiority by implying that they cannot be absorbed into the mainstream of American society. That's why black parents say, \"Teach my child good English. Don't tell me he can't learn it just like whites do.\" EDTUCATOR B: Teaching black children black English and white English is a disguised form of racism, not much different from the racism of those who believe that

Reading, Writing, and Black English

Since the late 1950s linguistic theory and dialectology have gone their separate ways. Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance led to a devotion to underlying linguistic ability, and many disciples came to worship at the shrine of innate ideas. Much attention was given to explicating the rules underlying linguistic competence, while very little attention was given to its potential or actual variations. As Chomsky said in 1965, "Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors ... in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance" (Aspects, p. 3). In this way, dialectology and linguistic theory became almost antithetical, for linguistic theory, as defined by Chomsky, left little or no possibility for variation within the idealized speaker-hearer. Actual language use, with which most dialectologists are concerned, was relegated to the peripheral area of performance, which, by definition, could not advance beyond a mere, or in the pejorative vernacular of the day, trivial collection of isolated data, which are uninteresting in themselves because they are collected and analyzed without an attendant linguistic theory. In fact, the study of language as it is actually used could not proceed until the rules of a more basic lingustic ability had been more fully elaborated. Chomsky remarks that "there seems to be little reason to question the traditional view that investigation of performance will proceed only so far as understanding of underlying competence permits" (Aspects, p. 10).

Susan H. Houston

Papers

Competence and Performance in Child Black English.