anthropology, linguistics, and cognitive psychology.

any reader who tries to explain tbe community con-trasts in this book on the basis of race will miss the central point of the focus on culture as learned behavior and on language habits as part of that shared learning.

This book argues that in Roadville and Trackton the different ways children learned to use language were dependent on the ways in which each community structured their families, defined the roles that community members could assume, and played out their concepts of childhood that guided child socialization.

Only in the past few decades have blacks and whites of working-class communities come together in institutions of work, commerce, politics, and schooling where each has met yet a third set of ways of using language to get things done.

are the products of their history and current situation.

parents, children, teachers, and students pursued, to the extent possible in that period of history in that region, their normal priorities of meeting daily needs and sustaining their self-identities.

no deadlines, plans, or demands from an outside funding agency set limits on the time or direction of the cooperative arrangements between teachers and anthropologist.

and the significance of choices among language uses.

My entry into these specific communities came through a naturally occurring chain of events. In each case, I knew an old-time resident in the community, and my relationship with that individual opened the community to me. I had grown up in a rural Piedmont area in a neighboring state, so the customs of both communities were very familiar to me

For those members of my classes for whom such descriptions became a serious objective, their initial focus was on their interactions with their own children; subsequently, they gave attention to communicative situations in their classrooms and the textile mills.

I was both ethnographer of communication focusing on child language and teacher-trainer attempting to determine whether or not academic questions could lead to answers appropriate for meeting the needs of children and educators in that regional setting.

They brought a central question: What were the effects of preschool home and community environ-ments on the learning of those language structures and uses which were needed in classrooms and job settings?

They looked to education for the promises their parents had so often mouthed, and they reaffirmed a faith that schooling ought to make a difference in the job a man or woman could expect.?

Schools were designated to teach mill children everything from manners to morals; schoolteachers became preachers for the culture of the townspeople. They were charged to teach health and sanitation habits, grammar, self-control, neatness, and obedience. If mill children were to grow up and become voters, they would have to learn to read and write and to reform their "barbaric" "wild" ways.

they pursued different values in their homes and held strong attachment to maintenance of what they believed should be regionally accepted moral and religious values. The millworkers, living in company-owned houses in an area set apart from the town and townspeople,

Communication was a central concern of black and white teachers, parents, and mill personnel who felt the need to know more about how others communicated: why students and teachers often could not understand each other, why questions were sometimes not answered, and why habitual ways of talking and listening did not always seem to work.

who felt the need to know more about how others communicated