Why do children from some minority groups and children living in poverty do poorly in school when compared to white middle-class children? Researchers have offered a large number of different answers to this question. One of the most popular answers has been based on the notion of "decontextualized language." This article argues that…

It is proposed that the concepts of location and goal are helpful instructional tools in Russian, encouraging competence and discouraging incorrect analyses of sentence structure. Minor reorganization of conventional instructional materials and addition of a few sentences for discussion would be of significant assistance in student understanding.…

Basing a manual communication system on written forms of English has two problems: (1) conventional forms of manual communication are based on the wrong modality; and (2) they do not represent English on any level. This causes an imbalance in the word-to-sign ratio in the classroom. (PJM)

The following error made by Sudanese students in their written English is discussed: giving the direct translation of relative pronoun plus personal pronoun from the Arabic pattern instead of the relative pronoun. The structure of the relative clause in English and Arabic is also compared. (SW)

This issue of "TESL Reporter" presents the following articles: "Language Acquisition and Dialectalism" by Patricia G. Adkins, "Supplementation of Opposites in Simple Predicate Expansion" by Yao Shen, and "Form Class Baseball: A TESL Game" by Alice C. Pack. The meaning today of dialectal speech, or "bidialectal speech," is addressed by Patricia…

The author reacts to a critique of an earlier article he wrote on invented sentences in students learning English. (VWL)

Argues that Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) languages exhibit properties that are consistent with the typology of Lehmann and Venneman in which the basic dichotomy is between Object-Verb and Verb-Object languages and that there is no reason to believe that there are fewer exceptionless generalizations to be made about SVO languages than there are about…

Four issues of the "TESL Reporter" are presented. Contents are as follows: "The Utterance-Response Method to Pattern Drill" by Jason B. Alter; "Your Gestures and Mannerisms: A Help or Hindrance?" by Alice C. Pack; "Part II: A Structural Comparison of English and Tongan" by Ermel J. Morton; "Teaching…

The task of teaching grammar in language courses is difficult because many American students lack a thorough grounding in the structure of their own language that could serve as a model framework for learning the grammar of another. It is helpful therefore for language teachers to stress parallel structures in the two languages, and to introduce…

The contention that Esperanto is a natural linguistic system is discussed. Research is cited concerning universals of word order, dominant word order, polar type languages, Esperanto as a verb-subject-object language, and gapping in Esperanto. It is concluded that contrary to grammatical tradition, word order is not and cannot be completely free.…

The partitive genitive and other types of genitive are examined to show that despite Latin's rigid, well-defined case system, irregularities in the functioning of the system occur. This allows the system to maximize structural characteristics to offset potential ambiguities. (PMJ)

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…

Describes a sequence for teaching the Russian passive construction to exemplify how a learning sequence based on a contrastive analysis and on error analysis can lessen student errors. These errors are caused either by interference from the first language or over-generalization in the second language. (PMJ)

Sixteen papers are presented. Topics covered include language teaching, discourse analysis, code switching, phonetics, language and cultural identity, and descriptive and comparative studies. All presenters were from the Asia-Pacific area of the world. Papers include: "The Baba Malay Lexicon: Hokkien Loanwords in Baba Malay" (Anne…

This concluding article in a series concerning the use of the comma in Spanish gives specific examples of its use from Spanish literature. Concluding remarks outline the major purposes of the comma. (NCR)