This thesis examines children's thinking, learning and metacognition when designing their own computer games. The study aims to understand more about what kind of learning takes place, and how it emerges whilst children are authoring their own computer games. The aim is to get an insight into the cognitive processes students exercise that…

This study aimed to find out the implications of linguistic deviations of swardspeak to the language competencies of the gay students. This research also sought to determine the linguistic deviations in swardspeak used by the gay students; investigate the implications of the use of swardspeak to the language competencies of the students; and…

This research was directed toward uncovering and documenting relationships that exist between language and ideology in multilingual subjects. It is reported as a study complete in itself, though it was originally conceived as the first phase of a research effort whose purpose was to demonstrate that the experimental manipulation of belief systems…

This dissertation provides a heuristic model for defining, analyzing, and exemplifying the artistic dimension of black English. Further, it offers a method of recognizing and evaluating this aspect of verbal behavior for the purpose of strengthening curriculum development and methods of instruction. After a review of the literature that deals with…

The ways speakers of Black English modify features of their spoken dialect in the process of adapting their language to writing are examined in this dissertation, on the basis of a corpus of writing from 41 black students enrolled in a St. Louis community college composition course. Each student is represented by 500 to 1000 words of writing…

To investigate children's ability to make linguistic judgments, a 60-item Awareness of Acceptable Sentences task was constructed. This task and the reading subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test were administered to 144 children in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Analyses of results indicated that children's performance on the…

The American concern for prescriptive correctness in linguistic behavior, which derives from eighteenth centry British notions, met with considerable and significant challenge by the contrary descriptive notion in the first half of the nineteenth century. The energy of this challenge waned by mid-century and the prescriptive drive for linguistic…

Sociolinguistic attitudes of 160 high school students, 160 parents or other adults, and 40 high school teachers were studied through questionnaires administered in four South Carolina schools. Results indicated that a majority of students and teachers felt that dialect differences interfere with communication in the classroom, but that eradication…

This study investigated the interrelationship of articulation and receptive and expressive language performance by 306 children in kindergarten and first and second grade in Fort Collins, Colorado, with regard to age, sex, and socioeconomic level. Fifty-one males and 51 females from the sample group were tested on three pairs of tests: the Arizona…

This study compared the vocabulary of the period from 1943 to 1945 to the vocabulary of 1975. In addition to a direct comparison of word use, an indirect comparison was made using Thorndike's word list in the "Teacher's Word Book" (1931). The 1975 vocabulary, based on frequency of word appearance, was derived from 93 speeches made by students in…

This study examines linguistic form and communication style in working-class and middle-class black preachers of two types: those who are not seminary trained, who preach spontaneously, and those who are seminary trained, who read from a prepared text. Ten sermons were tape-recorded in natural settings at two churches in Washington, D.C. Analyses…

This study was conducted to investigate the hypothesis that science teaching, properly done, could have an effect on language usage among elementary school students. A population of 14 fourth-grade classrooms was randomly divided into experimental and control groups. All teachers attended workshops for 90 minutes every two weeks throughout the…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the writing of elementary children, grades four through six, to determine the relationship between specified genre and the development and use of figurative language. Three teachers, one each in grades four, five, and six in the Metropolitan School District of Perry Township, Indiana, collected…

This study investigated the effects of advance organizers on selected cognitive styles and structures within a programmed task of grammatical usage. More specifically, the immediate effects of advance organizers were assessed as they related to subjects' field dependency or independency and high or low levels of prior knowledge of general grammar…

In this study, a comparison was made between the achievement scores in English usage of students who were assigned English classes during their last two years of high school and the scores of students who elected English classes. The 667 participants in this study were members of the 1970 and 1972 graduating classes at Aviation High School,…