Social Dialects and Their Implications for Beginning Reading Instruction

An effort to lay the foundation for the preparation of reading programs which will match the social and linguistic background of lower-class children, in particular children of the nation's black ghettos, is made in this paper. The paper consists of five sections. The first section discusses the interconnection of social, geographic, and stylistic variations, and stresses that reading and writing are both secondary to spoken language. The second section discusses various theoretical problems, focusing on the status of Black English and Anglo English as dialects of American English. The third section considers the pedagogical relevance of sociolinguistic data and discusses deep structure and surface structure. The fourth section discusses field methods and analysis procedures to determine the linguistic competence of an individual or a group. The fifth section concludes that the teacher and the developer of reading instructional treatments share the difficult task of bridging the gap between normative culture-defined entry skills and attitudes and those of children from any of the American subcultures. (TS)