Abstract
A measure of standard English (SE) performance was administered to children from ten culture/language groups in the Western United States. The measure consisted of 29 grammatical features of SE embedded in sentences selected from samples of child speech recorded in natural settings; reliability and validity data for the measure (an elicited imitation task) are reported. Rank order correlations were used to compare the order of difficulty of the 29 grammatical features among the ten groups tested. For SE, English as a second language (ESL) and nonstandard dialect speakers, the correlations were uniformly positive and statistically significant. These results suggested that elementary school children from a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds experience difficulty with the same SE grammatical features. A variety of research confirms the common order of difficulty hypothesis. Adjusting SE curricula to dialect- and ESL-speaking populations can be based on the apparently invariant sequence with which SE is learned.
Published Version
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