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Ways with Words is a classic study of children learning to use language at home and at school in two communities only a few miles apart in the southeastern United States. 'Roadville' is a white working-class community of families steeped for generations in the life of textile mills; 'Trackton' is a black working-class community whose older generations grew up farming the land but whose current members work in the mills. In tracing the children's language development the author shows the deep cultural differences between the two communities, whose ways with words differ as strikingly from each other as either does from the pattern of the townspeople, the 'mainstream' blacks and whites who hold power in the schools and workplaces of the region.
List of contents
Photographs, maps, figures, tables, texts; Acknowledgments; Prologue; Note on transcriptions; Part I. Ethnographer Learning: 1. The piedmont: textile mills and times of change; 2. 'Gettin' on' in two communities; 3. Learning how to talk in Trackton; 4. Teaching how to talk in Roadville; 5. Oral traditions; 6. Literate traditions; 7. The townspeople; Part II. Ethnographer Doing: 8. Teachers as learners; 9. Learners as ethnographers; Epilogue; Epilogue - 1996; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
Summary
This book, first published in 1983, raises fundamental questions about the nature of language development, the effects of literacy on oral language habits, and the sources of communication problems in schools and workplaces. Heath focuses on two communities, 'Roadville' and 'Tracton', which are only a few miles apart, but the language especially in children are very different.
