This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the influence of black nonstandard English on how a person is perceived, (2) Navajo language maintenance and shift, (3) the relationship of the syntactical features of ebonics and the reading comprehension achievement of middle class black children, (4) the communication patterns of aged Jews in a modern urban setting, (5) techniques for aiding black basic writers, (6) the relationship between understanding grammatical conjunction and reading comprehension in Native American children, (7) idiomatic communication behaviors as indicators of acculturation, (8) the determination of the scoring criteria for a Spanish informal reading inventory for bilingual students, (9) inner-urban schools and reading achievement, (10) the effects of an intercultural communication workshop on American participants' intercultural communication competence, and (11) the use of linguistic structures in folklore for teaching Spanish reading comprehension skills to fourth grade Puerto Rican children. (FL)