As W. Labov has passed away, I came across a comment reposting this screenshotted request, along with the paper in question:

https://betsysneller.github.io/pdfs/Labov1966-Rabbit.pdf

The paper is quite a rollercoaster, ranging from describing of disturbingly racist ideas about native Hawaiian and Black children that some scientists still pushed at the time (1970!*), to Labov’s own disarmingly cute and humane solution to the issue of testing children’s language abilities.

Edit: *1970 - according to the article itself, which is apparently based on Labov’s 1970 talk; however, the URL suggests that the article was published in 1966, which is contradictory. I’ll try to find out where and when this was actually published…

Edit 2: It looks like it is from 1970, from Working Papers in Communication, vol. 1 (Honolulu: Pacific Speech Association). It is surprising that a recently published book also claims that it’s from 1966, probably the authors got the file from the same URL with the wrong year.

Edit 3: The original Twitter thread: https://xcancel.com/betsysneller/status/1516848959284678656

  • @Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
    10•11 days ago

    I actually tutored a kid to get her into kindergarten, lol. She was bright but her first language was Korean and she was shy about speaking in English, maybe also shy about white people. So we basically hung out and “read” picture books together, my role just being to give positive reactions to whatever she said. And she got in, so it worked I guess.