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For some time, teaching Standard English has been a problem of major proportion at Versia L. Williams Elementary School, Fort Worth, Texas. Even casual observation shows that pupils do not grasp much of the classroom English teaching, nor do they transfer that which they do learn to other school work or daily use. The instructional program in English at the Williams Elementary School, therefore, must be supplemented to the extent that the pupils may be given the kinds of experiences in the classroom that will ultimately result in their learning Standard English in a manner that will enable them to relate the "book talk" to their own idiolects, which according to Giddings (2) everyone has. They bring to school a well-established set of habits which they will continue to use in spite of the classroom instruction, because they hold on to the teaching of their first teachers--their mothers.

Passions flare up around the use and “misuse” of prescriptive rules. Where there is variation in language use, language judgment usually follows—attaching value judgment to linguistic variants forms the foundation of prescriptive ideology in English. Prescriptive attitudes prevail among speakers and writers of English, who feel some pressure to use these forms to avoid a negative judgment. This study surveyed American English speakers using Mechanical Turk to determine which types of rules—spelling, syntactic, morphological, and lexical—bother people the most and inspire the harshest judgments when violated. The surveys asked participants to identify a violated prescriptive rule in a sentence, found using the magazine and newspaper registers of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and then to indicate how much they were bothered by the violation. Results indicated that lexical rules separating subtle semantic differences—i.e. farther vs. further, comprise vs. compose—tend to be less bothersome and less recognizable than other types of rules. However, the type of category that a prescriptive rules falls under does not seem to explain why some rules are more bothersome or recognizable than others. It may be possible to generalize by assuming that lexical prescriptive rules will be less important to a general educated American audience than spelling or grammar rules, and that nonstandard dialectal forms will be even more bothersome. However, the ability to generalize these results is limited: there is some evidence for a “pet-peeve” effect. Individuals seem to simply be bothered by different rules, without strong patterns showing some types of rules sharply more important than others. Additionally other prescriptive rules, including those regarding nauseous and dove as the past tense of dive, were more recognizable and bothersome in their prescribed form than their proscribed, providing evidence for semantic shifts.

Though much work has been done on the definition of Standard English and on the standardization process, little attention has been paid to the role of copy editors in that process. Editors comprise a class of craft professionals employed to remove errors from texts and make them more consistent, but when editors speak about editors at all, they generally rely on anecdotes rather than hard data about what editors do. Since formal written English is often used as a baseline for determining what is standard, and since corpora of published writing are increasingly used to research questions of usage, it is important to understand the role of copy editors in shaping the text that we see on the printed page. This study examines the usage and grammar changes made by student editorial interns in twenty-three academic journal articles. Volunteer professional editors were then solicited to edit the same articles, and their changes were compared against the interns' changes. The changes were counted and categorized to determine which usage rules can be considered most important to copy editors and thus most essential to distinguishing Standard Edited English from standard unedited writing. It was found that the most frequent changes were several grammatical items and a few lexical items, including the that/which rule, avoidance of towards, increased parallelism, and standardization of s-genitive forms. These changes confirm the idea that editors play a role in standardization, particularly codifying certain forms by reducing optional variation. From this data we can conclude that educated written usage and edited usage are not necessarily the same and should not be conflated. These findings also have implications for the use of corpus data in usage studies by showing that the final version of a printed work does not necessarily show the usage of edited writers but likely has a substantial contribution from copy editors.

Aliteracy defines those who can read adequately but who choose not to read for their own interest and pleasure. Adolescent aliteracy is an international issue (OECD, 2000, 2010a). Dissonance between what schools and students consider as ‘engaging reading’ is widening (Ivey & Broadhuss, 2001; Wilheilm & Smith, 2002). Recent evidence of poor literature knowledge amongst teachers and pre-service teachers (Cremin, Mottram, Bearne, & Goodwin, 2008; Nathanson, Pruslow, & Levit, 2008) highlights the need for pragmatic ways to empower adolescent students to address aliteracy for themselves. The aim of this thesis was to explore the conceptual basis for adolescent aliteracy in the 11-13 year old age groups alongside pedagogy to support currently aliterate adolescents. A mixed methods approach used 8 sets of data to explore reading preferences, reading motivations and self-selection behaviours in a mixed and stratifed sample of currently aliterate students over 6 months. The tools were: a reading preference survey, a Title Recognition Test (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1991), the Motivations for Reading Questionnaire, (Wigfield, Guthrie, & McGough, 1996), library observations, student and teacher interviews, library borrowing records and summative reading scores. Data analysis included thematic analysis, multiple regressions, Chi squared, Wilcoxon signed-ranked tests and Spearman’s correlations. Media based titles, magazines and SMS texting were cited as the most popular reading choices. Avid, poor and currently aliterate adolescent readers had significantly distinct motivational and cognitive reading profiles. Exploratory results with a stratified sample of currently aliterate students suggest that taught self-selection strategies significantly increased motivation to read for challenge and for curiosity and decreased motivation to read for reasons of compliance. Amongst currently aliterate adolescents, results suggest significant interaction between reading identity, reading challenge, reading stamina and reading interest.

A number of arguments appeared in the late-nineteenth-century United States about “correctness” in language, arguments for and against enforcing a standard of correctness and arguments about what should count as correct in language. Insofar as knowledge about and facility with “correct” linguistic usage could affect one’s standing in the social structure, such knowledge and facility functioned as a form of capital—linguistic capital. This dissertation considers treatments of linguistic capital in a variety of contexts, including verbal criticism, linguistics, composition pedagogy, and novels. The subject of Chapter 1 is verbal criticism, popular writings that quibble over the “correct” meanings of words. Verbal critics’ goals and conclusions, however, were often full of contradictions. My first chapter offers an explanation for these contradictions based on their resonance within late-nineteenth-century capitalism’s social structure. Chapter 2 centers around William Dwight Whitney‘s efforts to establish what he called the “science of language” in America. Whitney’s potentially progressive principles sometimes appear conservative, capable of rationalizing a laissez-faire politics with regard to language and class—a politics this chapter considers in relation to Whitney’s attempt to craft an ethos for the discipline of linguistics. My third chapter examines the dominant composition pedagogy of this period, current-traditional rhetoric, at a time when universities increasingly admitted middle-class students. Chapter 3 considers what types of cultural capital current-traditional pedagogy assumed its students possessed and what effects its assumptions imply. Chapter 4 focuses on William Dean Howells, whose realist novels represented the language of various characters as precisely as possible in an effort to encourage readers to accept speakers of non-prestige dialects. This chapter explores the possibilities and the limits of Howells’s efforts, and what those possibilities and limits imply for any progressive language policy. The Conclusion analyzes the most famous attempt by a professional organization to adopt such a progressive language policy, the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” Deliberation over this policy deeply divided teachers in the language arts. My conclusion considers why both sides may be right—and wrong—to think their preferred means can achieve what turns out to be an agreed-upon end. / text

<p>The aim of this paper is to explore the features that combine to make up the distinctive accent of the actor Sir Sean Connery. This study outlines the subject’s basic vowel system and compares it to data collected on the vowel systems of Received Pronunciation (RP) and Scottish Standard English (SSE) from previous research (Stuart-Smith 1999, Hawkins & Midgely 2005, Fisk 2006). Furthermore, this essay examines the degree to which other elements associated with SSE are present in the subject’s accent. These features include the Scottish Vowel Lengthening Rule (SVLR), the presence of dark /l/, rhoticity and T-glottalling. It is hypothesised that the subject speaks a modified variety of SSE yet retains the aforementioned qualities typically associated with SSE.</p><p>The speech analysis software programs Wavesurfer (version 1.4.7.) and Praat (version 4.4.33.) were used to analyse sections of sound taken from a speech given by the subject at an awards ceremony. Instrumental analysis of this nature was deemed appropriate in order to establish a high degree of objectivity in this study. Of the wide range of recorded material available the subject’s acceptance speech was judged most suitable for analysis. This is a passage of spontaneous speech as opposed to a movie script, where the subject talks of his background and career.</p><p>Having analysed the subject’s accent in this way, certain sociolinguistic implications can be drawn. The results suggest that Sir Sean Connery does indeed speak a variety of SSE however rather surprisingly the subject’s accent appears quite typical of his Edinburgh origins. The vowel system not only identifies the subject as an SSE speaker but also indicates traces of his working-class background e.g., the frontal quality to Connery’s realisation of /u/ and his low /I/ are typical of a working-class SSE speaker. Moreover, the general low quality found in Connery’s basic vowel system can be interpreted as revealing a little of his working-class origins.</p><p>Evidence of the other features associated with SSE was also found in the subject’s accent. Durational evidence indicates (albeit tentatively at this stage) that the SVLR operates within his accent while dark /l/ and t-glottalling were also observed.</p><p>While it is also apparent that Connery speaks a rhotic variety of English it is the nature and variety of his /r/ production that is most interesting. The subject appears to produce a retroflex realisation of /r/ which affects other consonants in its environment. This /r/ may be indicative of an earlier Irish influence over Connery’s accent.</p><p>It should be stated that due to the nature and the limited size of this study, all findings are preliminary and more research is needed into this area before any firm conclusions can be drawn.</p>

<p>Society exhibits a wide variety of different languages with various prominent features. At the same time as we honour diversity, however our civilisation is coloured with prejudice and preconceptions. Even if there is a rather liberal view on language use today, dialects and accents still carry positive and negative connotations for a majority of citizens. Research shows, that we are prejudiced and that we have predetermined ideas when it comes to certain language varieties.</p><p>In this study, I take up four varieties of Standard English: American, English, Australian and Scottish. I focus on the associations Swedish students make when it comes to these four language varieties and how this transforms into attitudes towards the speakers. A language attitude study is carried out by using a modified Matched Guise Test. I explain the difference between dialect and accent, as well as societal attitudes to language varieties and present some prominent linguists and their methods. Finally, I draw some conclusions by comparing my results to previous findings.</p>