A study compares and contrasts a set of English and Spanish prepositions of location in the context of prototype theory. It seeks to establish the prototype concept of each preposition and the degrees of prototypicality by testing for native-speaker choices of examples that illustrate best the most basic use of the preposition. The prepositions…

Discusses how linguists determine relationships of languages and group them into a family. Presents a crossword puzzle as a student activity, suitable for science and other classes, to determine the Indo-European roots of English words by a comparative method. (SK)

An approach to teaching expository writing in English as a Second Language (ESL) to native speakers of Chinese is offered. It is based on a comparison and classification of rhetorical patterns in the two languages. Chinese rhetoric contains a wide variety of methods of presentation, including both direct and indirect, or metaphoric, forms. It is…