Speech‐language pathologists serving multicultural populations may encounter unfamiliar beliefs about speech disorders among the members of different cultures. This study used a questionnaire to look at attitudes toward four disorders (cleft palate, dysfluency, hearing impairment, and misarticulations) among 166 university students representing English-speaking North American culture and several other cultures (e.g., Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hispanic). The results showed significant group differences on items involving the subjects’ beliefs about the emotional health of persons with speech disorders and about the potential ability of speech-disordered persons to change their own speech.

If literature is to be a useful vehicle for the teaching of second language skills, that literature must first succeed as a literary experience for the student. The failure of literary texts in second language teaching is often the result of a failure to encourage or even to allow students to receive such texts as literature, that is, as a literary experience. Consequently, second language teachers interested in using literature in their classes must be aware of how literature can teach second language skills while, at the same time, retaining its literary value for second language learners.

The English of Los Angeles Mexican-Americans ranges from the local standard to Chicano English, a non-standard ethnic dialect. Speech approaching Chicano English was negatively stereotyped by Anglo-American university students on scales related to success, ability, and social awareness. Forty-eight UCLA students rated 4 pairs of matched guise voices on 15 semantic differential scales. Dialect differences consistently affected their rating. But raters also attended to non-dialect voice differences, especially for more standard English voices. In rating standard English, students used a different, more complex procedure for judging personality.The purpose of this study is to determine what attitudes Anglo-American college students in Los Angeles have towards Mexican-Americans (Chicanos) who speak standard English as compared with those who speak a Chicano dialect of English. The term Anglo or Anglo-American is used in the south-west to refer to an individual who speaks English and is not identified as a member of an ethnic minority group. Chicano (a shortening of Mexicano) is used to refer to a resident of the south-western United States of Mexican ancestry. Chicano was originally a derogatory term; but younger and more militant Mexican-Americans have come to accept it as a preferred designation.Chicanos are not Mexicans and are generally not recent immigrants from Mexico. A 1B1exican-American community has existed in the south-west since before the arrival of Anglos.Mexican-American or Chicano English doubtless has its historic origins in the first language interference among native speakers of Mexican Spanish who were adjusting to an English speaking community. Such interference still persists in the speech of recent arrivals from Mexico into various parts of the south-west. But the special linguistic features of the English spoken in long established Mexican-American communities such as the east-central Los Angeles bario can no longer be dismissed as a foreign accent used within a Spanish speaking community. Both Spanish and English are spoken by residents within the Los Angeles bario. The English may be spoken with what sounds from the outside like a foreign accent, but for many Chicanos English is a native, first language.' In fact, many speakers of Mexican-American English are not fluent speakers of Spanish. Social pressures within the bario encourage the use of 1 A list of supposed features of Mexican-American English is presented in Part 1 of Bartley and Politzer (1972). This list is, however, based more on a contrastive analysis of Spanish and English than on actual observation of the speech of MexicanAmericans. Observations reported in Lance (1969) suggest that the English of Mexican-Ameiicans is linguistically different from the English spoken by native speakers of Mexican Spanish who have learned English as a second language.

Second language learners can make judgments as to the acceptability of verbal sequences in a target language text. However, such judgments are often different from judgments of the same text by native speakers of the target language. These differences can be interpreted as a gauge of differences between the learners' transitional competence and the competence of native speakers. Similarly, changes in learner judgments may indicate changes in transitional competence. The latter part of this paper reports a study in which learner judgments are used to test a model of change in learner competence proposed by S. Pit Corder (1971) and an extension of that model proposed by Jacquelyn Schachter, Adele F. Tyson, and Frank J. Diffley (1976).

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