A Pilot Study of the Effect of Contrastive Instruction on the Standard English Proofreading Skills of Dialect Different Students

Abstract

U From Labov's award winning The Study of Nonstandard English (1969) to the Center for Applied Linguistics' series on Dialects and Educational Equity (Wolfram and Christian 1979), much research in the last 15 years has served to validate the existence of systematic, rulegoverned varieties of nonstandard English. However, with some noteworthy exceptions (see Geuder 1972, Sternglass 1975, Duffin, Kroll, and Winkworth 1977, Scott 1981), there have been too few empirical studies identifying effective methods by which speakers of nonstandard English can acquire Standard English skills. The purpose of this pilot study was to implement a pretest/post-test, single-group design to see if contrastive instruction produced an educationally significant difference in the Standard English proofreading skills of dialect different students. Contrastive instruction was defined as instruction which contrasts linguistic features of Standard and nonstandard English. Proofreading was defined as the final stage of the writing process, in which the writer examines what has been written with reference to the grammatical rules of Standard English. Standard English was loosely defined as the variety of English customarily used by the prestige group, required by the professions, and promoted by educational institutions. Dialect different students were defined as those students whose form of English is characteristic of a specific race, social class, and/or ethnic background and differs from Standard English in such features as inflection, tense system, pronoun usage, use of the verb to be, and vowel succession. The subjects in this inquiry were 20 ethnic students (13 Blacks, 4 Hispanics, 3 Asians) enrolled in Student Academic Services (SAS) at California Polytechnic State University. (SAS provides academic support for students who are underrepresented in the California State University by virtue of race, ethnicity, and/or socioeconomic status-the same groups who are identified as dialect different.) These 20 subjects were also enrolled in English 106, an applied linguistics course designed to assist