They performedsimilarly on both measures in the fall testing, but the KEEP groupmade greater (although not statistically significant) gains in thespring testing than did the public school group. Although she iscareful to note limitations in the design of the study, Speidel (1987a)argues that these results suggest a relationship between teacherdiscourse modifications in small-group lessons and HCE-speakingchildren's use of SE grammatical features

s it led to more productive achievement-related behavior by the students on a variety of measures, includingtime on task, correct responses, and text content discusse

equal time,"by allocating speaking turns equitably among the children duringthe lesso

acilitate thelearning of basic academic skills and content" and part-Hawaiianchildren's "adaptation to conventional school situations"

Both these modifications of classroomdiscourse have, in fact, been incorporated into a successful readingprogram at the Kamehameha Early Education Program (

983). Doing so can reveal interactionastyles that help reduce chances of miscommunication or preventhem altogether, as demonstrated by research on language use incommunities and classroo

of SE grammaticalfeatures in oral langua

and then answered comprehensionquestions based on the stories. Combined scores for the two groupsrevealed no significant difference between the HCE and SE groupson overall listening comprehension abil

ting. It seems theyunderstand SE perfectly well, but they do not u

The HCE speakers comprehended the HCE stories moreeasily and more accurately than the SE stories, and the SE speakerscomprehended the SE stories more easily and accurately than theHCE stories

r. Contextual cues appeared most influentialwhen they did not conflict with syntactic cues, and although most ofthe SE speakers showed no sensitivity to these conditioning factors,most of the BEV speakers

elitist view of what "good"English is, that is, a prescriptivist attitude that fails to recognizesociolinguistic diversity

therhetoric of patriotism with sound pedagogical principles, and theyshould be wary of falling into the role of "guardians of thelanguage

that interlocutors understand all aspectsof either the surface or underlying structure of utterances to whichthey respond

However, it is painfully obvious that in the United States, SE hasbeen systematically imposed on speakers of minority varieties ofEnglish for several generations through every institutional channelin existenc

4), African American andCaucasian primary-school children were presented with sentenceimitation and comprehension tasks. The African Americanchildren's ability to perform these tasks was taken to indicate anabsence of comprehension difficulty across vari

take theposition that SE is indeed associated with educated, middle- andupper-class segments of English-speaking populations:

f utterances addressed to vendors in amarketplace-for example, How much are the yams a pound? andWhat is this thing called?-she was not understood. The usual wayof posing such questions proved to be, What a pong fuh di yam?and How yuh call

ired, since it is extremely difficult to pinpoimoments of confusion or uneasiness about what is being said in retime interaction and to determine that the source of dissonance isspecifically linguisti

bidialectalism

t speakers of minority varieties ofEnglish still have good reason to resist the status quo in U.S. class-rooms and that minority variety maintenance is often one manifes-tation of that resistance.

Perhaps more important to the prospect of long-term educationalchange is the maintenance of minority varieties as a form ofresistance to political and economic exploitatio

], large enough to meetall the communicative needs of its speake

, they are fiercely loyal to their own varieties. In theface of massive long-term negative pressure, minority varieties ofEnglish persis

t it is the negativeattitude toward minority varieties that must change, since thevarieties themselves will not be relinquished by their speakers

creole

This article reviews two areas of research that provide someinsight into the academic difficulties encountered by SESD stu-dents.

le. The latter groups' success probably owes much tosocioeconomic status, parents' educational levels, and positiveattitudes toward mainstream schooling, whereas the SESD groupsexperiences are no doubt tied to generations of socioeconomic andethnic stratification in American society (Ogbu, 1

Americans, and other second dialect speakers consistentlyunderachieve academi

,prescriptivism has consistently engendered resistance, althoughusually to the detriment of the resisters.

-there are minority varieties to consider: BlackEnglish Vernacular (BEV), Appalachian English, British WestIndian English, Louisiana Creole English, (South Carolinian and SeaIslands) Gullah, Chicano English, and Hawaii Creole English, toname but a few

This trend has important consequences ineducation, not only for speakers of languages other than English,but also for speakers of minority varieties of Eng

1969). It is lessfamiliar, however, to the generation of teachers that has appeared inU.S. public schools since the period of the Civil Rights Movement,many of whom have little or no historical understanding of theircurrent "problems" in teaching SESD stu

not only foster readingachievement, but facilitate the development of spoken SE as well

one who had workedextensively with part-Hawaiian children and one who had not,

ntial markesuch differences in form-function relationships are substenough to cause comprehension problems in interactions betwspeakers of different varieties is the point of a numb

h) is ra

estricted to only the most formal level of style" (p. 415).There is some disagreement in the literature about whether SE isassociated with a particular social group. Strevens (1985) claims thatSE is "not 'upper class English

Hudson, 1980, p. 32).

imbued by a society with greaterprestige

deliberate intervention by society, in

neither dialects nor creoles are defined on the basis of socialevaluation of particular ways of speaking. This is not to deny theexistence of such evaluation, but simply to recognize that it isseparable from the scientific description of linguistic variation andthe identification of different varieties of English.

me increasingly difficult in the 1980s forprofessionals to ignore ill-informed public discussions ofand educa

assimilationist

, assimilationist ideology is rejected as a way of legitimizingthe educational experience of language minority gro

for sociolingui

Traditionally underrepresented students may be held at a distance from academia due to their language use and due to the fact that there are no allowable identities that are linked to standardness and representative of their various social groups.

For 75% of the instructors, the reduction of race to African American or White and the assumption that African American students are products of poor inner-city schools reinforced the perceived connection between “nonstandard” writing and African American students and “standard” writing and White students and perpetuated Whiteness.

Whiteness allows instructors to both acknowledge a link between “good” writing and already privileged students (based on class and race) and remove themselves from either blame or responsibility for finding a solution for this unequal power system.

I end with a call to the composition community to both acknowledge and resist the enduring and troubling indexicality of SEAE within individual practices and scholarship—to allow more successful identities into our classrooms and research.