This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

Background: This study examined the use of student-teacher interactions through dynamic assessment (DA) to diagnose and promote the learner's comprehension on Chinese writing patterns. Debates over the uses of standardized tests to assess language learners' performance have been ongoing in the field of second language acquisition for many years.…

Presents a perspective on the system of language levels and logical operations that effective language users employ. Offers a rational for teaching this language system. Suggests activities for "moving language around" to help students develop concepts about language structures. (RL)

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…

Intended for students in regular and advanced composition classes, each of the four controlled composition exercises presented in this paper aims at teaching writing style through carefully constructed short passages that concentrate on an isolated problem in style such as parallel structure, relative clauses, pseudo-relative clauses, and…

Describes a successful unit on language that involved having students describe a specialized use of language they had personally experienced. (DD)

This article discusses sociolinguistics and how certain of its norms bear a direct relationship to the teaching objectives of EFL. (CLK)

This paper describes a collaborative project that sought to combine teacher development and illuminative research. Eight teachers on a general English course, working in pairs, observed each other's lessons and then held discussions, which were recorded and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Published coding systems were used by the…

Part of the Grade Teacher Special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts.

Dialogs are an effective tool for language acquisition and for transmission of cultural material. Much of the apparent confusion about how they should be used in the language classroom results from a failure to distinguish the ages and levels of proficiency of those for whom the dialogs are designed. The great advantage that dialogs have over…

A stylistics-based approach to teaching poetry in the English as a foreign language classroom is examined. Since students may not have the linguistic skills to appreciate a poem, an analytical framework is proposed that includes the elements of repetition, confusion, and surprise. Reference is made to two poems, "In a Season of Unemployment"…

Describes an assignment designed to dispel prospective English teachers' dichotomous ideas about language ("right" or "wrong"); gain a sense that more than one dialect could be accepted; and understand that the variations from the handbook rules ("errors") might even be rhetorically based. (TB)

Becoming bilingual as defined in this book is a process by which an adult acquires an additional language in the environment in which it is spoken, surrounded by the culture in which it is used. The book seeks to present the learner with an integrated and systematic treatment of his task--linguistic, cultural, and practical--in learning a new…

There is a large and growing demand for English language teaching to be provided specifically for the needs of a particular subject, profession, or occupation beyond the approach to English as a general educational and cultural subject. It is possible to isolate and define technical, technological, and scientific English, all with common features…