When I was first exposed to this project, "Usage matters: A comparative  study of judgments of English usage errors," I was struck by the strong  reaction that a few of the sample questions evoked in me.  Coming from a  family with a history of teaching, I am well aware of the "correctness"  prejudices I may harbor when it comes to Standard English.  That is why I  found this experiment so intriguing.  It was interesting for me to see the  degree to which the community would respond.  Is it true that our  preconceived notions of the "higher" academic or professional positions are  more educationally "correct"?  Or are we mistaken?  This study provides a  preliminary glimpse into how our community perceives errors in Standard  English and the degree to which we are concerned about them.
        A number of error categories were addressed in the survey.  The category  that distinguished itself was the "dialect difference" category.  Almost  without exception, the respondents indicated that they detected an error,  and the majority of those were "bothered a lot" by the error.  In comparison  to the other error usage categories, the "dialect difference" category  encountered the greatest number of maximum negative responses.  This is  extremely interesting to me because it indicates that, as a community, we  will not accept a dialectual form of writing. Maxine Hairston's study provides a glimpse of what we might have expected  from our own. (796)  Her original study found that respondents reacted most  strongly to errors that she termed "status markers."  The "dialect  difference" category of our study would have been included in this category.
      I find this statistic to be the most distressing, and yet the most  predictable statistic found in our study.  Hairston's study was conducted in  1981.  In a period of 18 years, there has been no change in tolerance
towards dialectual differences in writing.  This is predictable because the  survey was conducted with the intent to investigate error usage in writing.   According to Delpit, "…writing lends itself to editing.  While
conversational talk is spontaneous and must be responsive to an immediate  context, writing is a mediated process which may be written and rewritten  any number of times before being introduced to public scrutiny." (61)  For  this reason, educated community members expect a written work that is  grammatically correct from another member of the community. However, one has to worry about the implications of the study.  When  dialectual speech is considered, Edwards says, "speech samples may evoke  stereotyped reactions reflecting differential views of social groups." (25)   Essentially, a person who speaks in dialect will be perceived as part of a  lower class when compared to a person who speaks the standard dialect.
Edwards goes on to provide evidence, saying that members of high-status  groups demonstrated favorable reactions towards the high-status speech, as  did members of lower-status groups. (22)  The resounding implication is that  dialect speakers, and therefore possibly dialect writers, will be perceived  as having less intellect, less status, and less potential.
     This phenomenon becomes especially alarming when applied to our schools and  teachers.  A study done by Rosenthal and Jacobson investigates the effect a  student's background has on the teacher's response to that background and  how it affects his/her education.  They found that, "children from whom
teachers expected greater intellectual gains showed such gains." (313)  More  importantly, for children who were predicted to have little intellectual  improvement over time, "the more they gained (in IQ), the less favorably  they were rated."  This study shows that children who were at a  disadvantage-- be it racial, cultural, and/or dialectual-- suffered from  educational bias on the part of the teachers involved in the study.  If they  were "marked" as underachieving students ahead of time, then there was every  chance they would be underachievers.  The students deemed as high potential,  even if they were found to be otherwise beforehand, still showed greater  gains intellectually.  Is this a conscious reaction by our teachers? It appears that dialect in speech is definitely a problem.  It is simple to  consider, then, the transition that speech would make onto paper.  It is  plausible to consider that the prejudices encountered by students who speak  in a nonstandard dialect would face those prejudices in the classroom, even  if they did not write in dialect.  Students not only face prejudice, but at  a younger age they face learning deficiencies.  Delpit argues that students  often suffer from "hypercorrection" in the classroom. (59)  She states that  teachers lose sight of the fact that learning to read is a "meaning-making  process."  When a teacher expends his energy on correcting the  dialect-influenced pronunciations and grammar, he overlooks the fact that  the student is comprehending the sentence.  Because of the teacher's haste  to correct, the child "will be less likely to become a fluent reader than  other children who are not interrupted so consistently."  The child is  "encouraged to think of reading not as something you do to get a message,  but something you pronounce."
     So, the implications of our study reinforce the conclusions made by others,  and make me aware of a problem I never knew existed.  Perhaps there is an  indication that all is not as bleak as I make it out to be.  Also of  interest was the progression in toleration shown throughout the occupational  categories.  Generally, the college professors were the strictest group when  classifying errors, the business professionals less strict, and continuing  down to the middle school teachers, who were the least strict.
In light of my previous argument, this is a comforting trend.  Middle school  teachers were not only the most tolerant of errors overall, they were the  most tolerant of dialect difference errors.  Middle school teachers were  less likely to see dialect differences as an error, and if they did perceive  them as errors, they were less bothered by them than the other occupations.   The researchers mentioned in this essay found that perhaps lower grade level  teachers were being too stringent in their enforcement of a standard  dialect.  Our study shows that, while this may be true, our middle school  teachers are nevertheless giving more leeway with dialect differences than  any other educational level.  This bodes well not only for our students, but  for the future of our educational system.
     If the understanding that dialect should be tolerated in light of reading  comprehension is there, then middle school teachers will only help improve  the educational quality of our children.  Hopefully, students can learn the  standard dialect and still retain their own dialect and the connections it  represents to their family and culture without it adversely affecting their  education.  It is the responsibility of our teachers to change the way  "correctness" is taught in view of the sensitivity of dialect as a component  of one's cultural identity.
     I was unaware of the problems our communities face when the impact of error  usage is considered.  I now know that my "correctness" prejudices are  misplaced in a way.  I used to view overcorrecting as a sign of higher  intellect, but now I see it can also be a sign of naivete when early  education is considered.  Hopefully in the future, we will devise a means  through which we can educate our children to their maximum potential and  still retain the cultural identities that make them who they are.