ABSTRACT
As the crisis of education in culturally heterogeneous industrialized societies grows, the educational failure of the poor has in some circles come to be seen primarily as a language problem. The justification given is that children who do least well in schools are for the most part speakers of dialects or languages distinct from majority speech, be they working class dialects, ethnically specific speech varieties such as Black English, or separate languages as with bilingual immigrant groups. Although the educators’ preconceptions that non standard speech is somewhat “lacking in grammar” and reflects “unsystematic thinking” have by now been disproved, many continue to assume that there is something about the phonological, syntactic or semantic characteristics of the home vernaculars that impedes the learning of writing skills and that contrastive analysis of the grammatical differences between standard varieties and those spoken by the minority group can lay the foundation for pedagogical strategies to remedy this learning problem.
