Robert L. Politzer

The Acquisition of English and the Maintenance of Spanish in a Bilingual Education Program.

Spanish and English versions of a 38-item grammar test were administered to 40 Spanish-surnamed pupils equally divided by sex at grade levels K, one, three, and five (10 subjects per grade) in a bilingual education program. The test was a revision of part of an earlier test for oral proficiency in Spanish and English. The reliability of the new test, measured by Cronbach a, was .95 for the Spanish version and .96 for the English version, but many items failed to elicit the expected grammatical constructions. English scores increased significantly with grade level, while Spanish scores varied only slightly among grade levels. Balance between mean scores on the English and Spanish versions was reached at grade three. Test subjects were also questioned about language use and preference. The relationships between reported language use and test results appeared to indicate that Spanish proficiency was determined by use of the language in the home. English proficiency showed some relationship to use with the peer group. There were no significant correlations between the English and Spanish version scores and only very slight relationships among the factors influencing them. Achievement in English thus appeared to be unrelated to the maintenance of Spanish for bilingual children.

Effects of Early and Delayed Second Language Acquisition English Composition Skills of Spanish‐ Speaking Junior High School Students

This research article is based on the findings of a doctoral study conducted at Stanford University which compared the English composition skills of two groups of junior high school Spanish-speaking students from two differing educational and cultural backgrounds: one group born and schooled in Mexico (K-2, 3) in Spanish and the other group born and schooled in the United States (K-7, 8) totally in English. By the time of the study, the students from Mexico had attended school in the U.S. and had been taught in English from grades three and four through grades seven and eight of junior high school. Findings from the study indicated that, except for their use of

A Test of Proficiency in Black Standard and Nonstandard Speech.

As part of the development of a test battery to determine proficiency in Black standard and nonstandard speech, a test was devised consisting of a repetition task. Fifteen sentences in Black standard and fifteen sentences in Black nonstandard English were to be repeated. The sentences were contained within two similar stories recorded on tape by a bidialectal speaker. A Black experimenter administered the test to 35 Black kindergarten children (18 male, 17 female) in the Spring of 1972. Tests were administered individually. The experimenter stopped the tape after each sentence containing a test item and asked the child to repeat the sentence. The response was scored as correct if the child repeated the test item exactly as modeled on the tape. Mean scores were 10.9 on the nonstandard and 11.3 on the standard section of the test, indicating a general balance between standard and nonstandard. The reliability of Section A (nonstandard) of the test was 0.49 (Cronbach a); for Section B (standard) it was 0.43. Subjects were also assigned a balance score (Section A minus Section B), which measured the dominance of nonstandard over standard. Scores of the same students on the Stanford Achievement Test and its subsection on letters and sounds correlated positively and significantly with the standard section of the test. Where there was an imbalance in favor of nonstandard there was a significant negative correlation with the Stanford Achievement Test and its subsection on letters and sounds. This paper reports on the experimental development of a test to measure the language proficiency of children who are speakers of Black English. The test is designed to measure the ability to speak both nonstandard and standard English. Black standard English has been defined as English that follows most of the grammatical rules of standard English but is

Requesting in Elementary School Classrooms.

Classes were videotaped of nineteen third-grade teachers teaching a lesson in the use of standard English negation to children who are dominantly speakers of vernacular Black English. Verbal interactions taking place in the classes of five teachers whose pupils scored highest (Group A), and of five teachers whose pupils scored lowest (Group B) on a posttest (adjusted by a pretest score) were studied. Patterns of requests performed by pupils and teachers were observed. The frequency of teacher requests overwhelmingly outweighed those of the pupils. The most common forms taken by teacher requests were direct imperative, subject matter information questions, and questions soliciting actions. Group A teachers used a much higher proportion of direct imperative requests than Group B teachers. The adjusted frequency of instruction-related imperatives significantly differentiated Group A from Group B teachers. The findings are interpreted as leading to an hypothesis concerning the efficiency of directive teaching in elementary school language arts and as demonstrating the usefulness of a motivational type of discourse as an approach to the solution of pedagogical problems.

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