This book traces the historical development of current attitudes toward language usage and, by examples and quotations, shows the steps in attitude change, including the creation and abandonment of rules. The book is based on the premise that standard English usage is open to different interpretations, and supports this premise with references to…

This study explored whether statistically significant differences exist between the (1) grammatical structures produced by high, average, and low black, inner-city elementary readers as measured by a language competency task; and (2) whether statistically significant interactions occur between reading achievement levels and the age of the child,…

Two lower socioeconomic groups (one black and one white) from the inner city and a third group of white children from a middle socioeconomic suburban area of Chicago were studied to delineate and compare the usage of selected language structures among children of different social and ethnic backgrounds. Usage of each of the test structures was…

An overconcern with the niceties of usage can undercut English teachers' efforts to eliminate public doublespeak. (JH)

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

Preliminary results from a large research project on the use of Frisian and Dutch in the official domain in Friesland focuses on language use in contacts between civil servants and customers in service encounters. Language patterns observed include convergence, neutrality, switching, and asymmetry. (CB)

Study of a one-year-old's earliest use of prepositions found that spatial oppositions ("up-down") were learned first, and used in non-prepositional senses prior to prepositional usage. "With,""by,""to,""for,""at," and "of" were learned later and used to express case relationships and more often misused and omitted than the earlier-learned…

Examines the challenge posed by the naturalist philosophy of language--the view that the meanings of symbols are fixed by the environment. Compares the naturalist philosophy with that presented in an activist Native American essay that argues for the preservation of traditional native languages. (SRT)

Explores specific classroom language used by students for whom English is a second language. (HOD)

A study investigated how Korean learners of English as a second language (ESL) differ from native speakers of English in the use of supportive moves and in the expression of politeness (use of downgraders) in requests, a speech act considered to be face-threatening. Three groups of subjects participated: 30 Korean students enrolled in an intensive…

An excerpt from the resolution of the executive committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which espouses the view that no variety or dialect of a language is intrinsically superior to any other, is presented. Implications for teaching standard and nonstandard dialects are discussed. (KC)

Develops analytical techniques to determine "borrowability," the ease with which a lexical item or category of lexical items can be borrowed by one language from another. These techniques are then applied to Spanish borrowings in Bolivian Quechua on the basis of a set of bilingual texts. (29 references) (MDM)

Argues that some important aspects of listening as an interactive skill have been neglected in second-language teaching, including the receipt tokens "yeah,""mm hm," and "mm," and that such items should be taught as part of the development of conversational skills. Characteristics of these items' placement in talk sequences, prosodic shape, pause…

This study examined patterns of interaction in conversations between native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English among 48 NS-NNS dyads of elementary school students in Australia. Results found that NSs used negotiation strategies and recasts to provide negative feedback to their NNS peers. Contains 57 references. (MDM)