Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms

A study of children learning to use language at home and at school in two communities a few miles apart in the southeastern US - one white, one black, both working-class.  Shows the deep cultural differences between the two communities , whose ways with words differ strikingly as they both do from the pattern of the the townspeople, the "mainstream" black and whites who hold power in the schools and workplace of the region.