This article presents a study of preschool-aged children's knowledge of the semantics of the negative polarity item (NPI) "any". NPIs like "any" differ in distribution from non-polarity-sensitive indefinites like "a": "Any" is restricted to downward-entailing linguistic environments (Fauconnier 1975, 1979;…

In a collaborative effort, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Document Design Project conducted an evaluation of marine radio rules for recreational boaters that had been rewritten in plain English by FCC personnel. The revised rules were evaluated by 53 experienced boaters and 52 inexperienced boaters, who were given either the…

A study tested the ability of 40 students at Ohio University, 20 Americans and 20 Chinese, to recall parts of nine news headlines flashed at them on pieces of paper. Students in communication subjects or linguistics were excluded as being too knowledgeable in communication theories. The hypothesis for the study stated that native Chinese speakers…

A study investigated 42 native English-speakers' (NSs) perceptions of the pragmatic appropriateness of refusal statements. The NSs rated the appropriateness of 24 written statements in 4 different refusal scenarios, which were collected from both native speakers and non-native speakers. Four weeks later, as a reliability check, the subjects rated…

A 3-year statewide English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) video learning mini-research project focused on three main areas of televised and video-based instruction in Texas: literacy, adult general education, and ESL. The project described in this paper is a subset of the statewide study and concentrates on the impact of video-based learning when used…

A study examined the attitudes of English educators and professional business persons concerning non-standard English-language usage. Subjects, equal numbers of male and female members of the National Council of Teachers of English and members of the Chamber of Commerce, responded to a questionnaire containing 66 sentences, each containing an…

A study investigated differences in native and non-native French speaking teachers' patterns of error correction of second-year students' compositions. Subjects were eight university teaching assistants (TAs), four native speakers of French and four non-native speakers. Data were drawn from photocopies of all students' corrected compositions…

A group of university students consisting of native speakers of Chinese (n=63), Japanese (n=33), Korean (n=21), Indonesian (n=20), and Arabic (n=13) with relatively extensive exposure to the American university environment and a control group of 20 native English-speakers were asked to rank the social appropriateness of 104 conversation topics.…

An Indonesian study on prereading strategies for reading in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is reported. Three areas were examined: (1) differences in the reading achievement of groups receiving AO ("advance organizer" or meaningful verbal learning, based on the learning theory of David Ausubel) techniques or "Daftar Kata-Kata…

A project to identify alternative strategies for assessing the academic language of English language learners is reported. First, literature on the concept of academic language is reviewed, and then findings from classroom research are used to propose an alternative conceptualization of academic language, one which focuses on the role of stylistic…

A study investigated beliefs about language learning held by two groups of students studying Arabic: 41 students in conventional classroom language instruction at the University of Wisconsin in 1992 and 1993, and 27 in an immersion program at the Yemen Language Center (Yemen). The survey instrument consisted of 47 statements in a Likert-type scale…

This study compared patterns in the requests of native Persian-speakers (n=50) and native speakers of American English (n=52) under the same social constraints. Students were undergraduate students in their native countries. Data were gathered by controlled elicitation (open questionnaire) and coded for degree of directness. Results show the…