To all: Code mixing in the classroom is indeed a very efficient way to hold back the social and economic development of the African-Americans or other ethnic groups in this country. It is indeed a discrimination matter, and its effect can be comparable to the damage welfare has caused to the African-Americans, Hispanics and other people in this country. Bill Cosby knows is very well, and this is why he has been lashing against this suble discrimination which bears the pretense of helping minorities. Why should African Americans be helped to move as fast as they could in order to obtain a good knowledge of Standard English, do well in school, and get good jobs, when they can be sabotaged through code mixing? Using a "research article" to prove that code mixing works in the classroom is just the same as using Hillocks article to prove that grammar causes brain damage to students and does not help in any way in developing better writing in students. The 13 years I spent in Queens, and my undergraduate and graduate research in language acquisition and language learning have taught me that the best way for students to learn a dialect or a language is through immersion. I saw again and again children of Eastern European background (Russian, Polish, Check, Romanian, Yugoslavian), come to New York with absolutely no knowledge of English and becoming fluent in Standard English after one, at most two years, of immersion in the public school Standard English. The English teachers, who knew only their mother tongues, could not switch or mix code on these foreign students, but this fact did not deter them from training the students to speak fluent English in record time. I can repeat the same story for the thousands of Haitian, Dominican, Columbian,Brazilian, and other Hispanic children who came to New York with their monolingual parents. We keep talking about English dialect codes in this country without little understanding of the social, political, and economic power the Standard American Dialect has in the lives of the people who live here. Languages and dialects can make or break countries or cause civil wars, can destroy the lives of people ( remember what happened to those who spoke German or Japanese in the United States during the second world war), can hold people back socially, economically and politically, and can create welfare societies. For those who are not sure of the power that dialects and languages can have on people I recommend "Language and Social Context" edited by Giglioli, and other books on the subject. What children of any ethnic background who live in this country need in order to become successful in school and in society is a good knowledge of Standard American English which should be obtained through Standard Dialect immersion, not code mixing. This is the approach which will put an end to language, social, and economic discrimination in the United States. If we are truly against discrimination, we should leave language welfare programs behind us. Eduard To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/