Abstract
that it is meant mostly for lower-class blacks and not for the lower class in general. It comes, fortunately, at a time when many blacks are piecing together their identity, saving it from powerful attempts to fragment and destroy it. It is therefore controversial and widely discussed (see, for example, Olivia Mellan, Black English. Why Try to Eradicate It, The New Republic, 28 November 1970, pp. 15-17). But it has not been discussed in a wide enough context, so it is my purpose to do that in the following pages, thus to indicate why this ill-advised attempt to change people should be rejected. Let me begin with what I understand to be some facts and some pretty good hunches about language and language learning. It is, for example, an empirical assumption that language differences intuitively understood as dialect differences are relatively superficial, that is th t they amount to rule differences (in the terminology of the linguistic theory of Chomsky) which fall quite low in the ordered set of rules that constitutes
- Journal
- College English
- Published
- 1972-01-01
- DOI
- 10.2307/375599
- CompPile
- Search in CompPile ↗
- Open Access
- Closed
- Topics
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation Context
Cited by in this index (0)
No articles in this index cite this work.
References (0)
No references on file for this article.
Related Articles
-
Composition Forum Oct 2025
-
Research in the Teaching of English Aug 2025Meghan Odsliv Bratkovich; Michael B. Sherry; Homood Alharbi
-
Writing Center Journal 2024Reflexiones sobre la construcción de espacios bilingües: los centros de escritura como puentes de diálogo académico en torno a la escritura y a la cultura ↗Andrea Salamanca Mesa; Ana Sofía Ramírez Viancha
-
Writing and Pedagogy May 2023Todd Ruecker
-
Written Communication Jan 2023Writing Toward a Decolonial Option: A Bilingual Student’s Multimodal Composing as a Site of Translingual Activism and Justice ↗Eunjeong Lee