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- Title
Teachers' correction responses to black-dialect miscues which are non-meaning-changing.
- Authors
Cunningham, Patricia M.
- Abstract
INVESTIGATED THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS: whether teachers' attitudes toward miscues which do not change content meaning (non-meaning-changing miscues) differed for miscues which were not due to dialect (non-dialect-specific) or were due to black dialect(black-dialect-specific), whether these attitudes differed across geographical regions: and whether a relationship existed between the teachers' tendency to correct black-dialect-specific miscues and the teachers' ability to recognize black dialect. Subjects were graduates enrolled in reading courses at 4 state universities. They responded to 2 questionnaires. On the first questionnaire, subjects indicated whether they would correct specific examples of reading miscues. Of the 18 non-meaning-changing miscues, 9 were not specific to any one dialect; 9 were black-dialect-specific. Results obtained from this questionnaire indicated that, regardless of geographic region (Southeast, Northeast, Southwest, Midwest), subjects corrected significantly more black-dialect-specific miscues than non-dialect-specific miscues. Overall, the responses indicated that the teachers would correct 78 per cent of the black-dialect-specific miscues and 27 per cent of the non-dialect-specific miscues. On the second questionnaire, subjects indicated whether they thought that the miscues from the first questionnaire were spoken mostly by blacks, mostly by whites, or equally by both. The overall correlation between the number of corrections of black-dialect-specific miscues and the number of such items correctly recognized as being spoken mostly by blacks was .00. Evidence from the .00 correlation and from comments written on the questionnaire by the subjects were interpreted as indicating that ignorance rather than racism explained the differential correction rate. Implications recommend teacher training which stresses 1) meaning equivalence between standard English and black dialect and 2) the grammatical nature of black dialect.
- Subjects
TEACHERS; ATTITUDE (Psychology); DIALECTS; LANGUAGE &; languages; RACE awareness; READING; CODE emphasis approaches to reading; MISCUE analysis; READING comprehension
- Publication
Reading Research Quarterly, 1977, Vol 12, Issue 4, p637
- ISSN
0034-0553
- Publication type
Article