Standard English Usage Research Articles

Terminology applicable to palatal lift prostheses

Current teminology relevant to palatal lift prostheses has been characterized as imprecise, inappropriate, and misleading. More appropriate words and terms derived from standard English usage and applied with specific reference in other scientific disciplines have been suggested.

Contemporary Gullah Speech

Within recent years, many federally funded programs have been devoted to the study of Black speech in America. Some great achievements have resulted from these programs, including the development of new curricula, better teacher-training programs, and a reversal of negative attitudes not only for Black students, but for all students who speak a nonstandard variety of English. Given the history associated with the study of proper or standard English usage, these accomplishments are no small feats. My only quarrel with the research undertaken on Black languages thus far is that it does not take into account other varieties of black speech. Most of the research has been undertaken with youths in the inner cities of New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, and elsewhere. There appear to be few,

What we can learn from writing research

150 Theory Into Practice In his report to the Ford Foundation Donald Graves (1978) noted that writing is seldom practiced in our schools. According to the surveys and reviews conducted for the report, classroom time, public investment in education, educational research, language arts textbooks, teacher certification requirements, and teacher education courses all favor reading over writing by a large ratio. Furthermore, what writing instruction there is generally consists of workbook exercises and drills in what are thought to be before writing skills, i.e., penmanship, vocabulary, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and standard English usage. Such exercises and drills may help students gain control over the mechanics of writing. Studies such as the National Assessment of Educa-

The class-inclusion task: question form and distributive comparisons.

The class-inclusion task is regarded by Piaget as a measure of the child's mastery of the structure of hierarchical classification. Class-inclusion was improved by changing the wording of the question to conform to standard English usage. A theoretical argument is offered that the child's difficulties with this task derive from confusion of collective comparisons, in which properties of classes are compared, and distributive comparisons, in which properties of elements are compared. A grammatical constraint on expression of distributive comparisons--an element of a class cannot be compared to an element of an included subclass--is hypothesized to be overgeneralized to expressions referring to collective comparisons such as the class-inclusion task. This hypothesis accounts for the improvement in class-inclusion performance with changes in wording of the question and for the finding that young children's response to class-inclusion questions and to ungrammatical requests for comparison of an element of a class and an element of an included subclass are similar: the children respond readily but understand wrongly that the comparison involves coordinate classes.

Non Standard English Usage in the Writing of Black, White, and Hispanic Remedial English Students in an Urban Community College

Non Standard English Usage in the Writing of Black, White, and Hispanic Remedial English Students in an Urban Community College