This reference guide presents detailed information about current English usage with emphasis on both formal and informal written language. The practical needs of advanced learners of English as a second language are considered and there is heavy concentration on grammatical usages that continue to trouble foreign students: articles, verb forms,…

Children in school cooperate in the evaluation of their products and activities by teachers and other students by calling attention to these products and activities with various language strategies. The requests that someone notice something and/or praise it are the data base for this study. The unmarked speech act for this request type is in the…

This work is intended to find replies to practical questions, such as how well native speakers of Spanish are decoded by native speakers of English, which errors interfere with decoding by the listener, and what the implications of the study might be for teaching. Fifteen Chileans were asked to tell stories in English, and several panels of native…

Progress in the teaching of oral comprehension depends partly on the isolation of factors which block comprehension. Research in conjunction with an experimental course in English as a second language led to the definition of errors due to: (1) insufficient knowledge of the language and the cultural context of its use, and (2) a failure to…

The paper focuses on the linguistic behavior of Negro children concentrated in communities where a non-standard form of English is the accepted currency. Such children are verbal, possess a language fully developed to serve the needs of their "world," and think effectively enough to survive in a sometimes hostile environment. Certain basic…

This study investigated English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) teachers' patterns of verbal behavior concerning student errors, the relationship between error type and teacher treatment, and the effect of error treatment on subsequent student outcome. Subjects were students in seven EFL classes in Japanese high schools, taught by native Japanese…

This publication presents 20 conference papers in French and German on aspects of linguistic research. Papers include: "Objectivite et subjectivite dans la connaissance du langage" (Mahmoudian); "Focalisation et antifocus"(Bearth); "Remarques sur la notion d''etymologie populaire'"(Chambon); "Sur la construction serielle en malgache"; (Fugier)…

This article discusses the incompatibility between the goal of communicative competence (defined more narrowly as minimal approximative communicative competence) and current practices of syllabus design, and suggests more relevant alternatives. Foreign language instruction is still dominated by the teaching of language structure for its own sake,…

From a consideration of variability in language-learner and language-user data, the concept of proficiency is considered in relation to models of second and foreign language learning. Proficiency is defined in relation to four separate dimensions: grammatical well-formedness, speech-act rules, functional elaboration, and code diversity. This…

This report is a cross-linguistic study that compares the sequence of emergence of semantic relations in English with the sequence of emergence of these relations in the acquisition of American Sign Language. American Sign Language (ASL) differs from English in modality (it is a visual-gesture language rather than an auditory-vocal one) and in the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with the following topics: sex appropriate and sex inappropriate language; lexical retrieval and perceptual errors; naming deficits in anomia and aphasia; developmental discourse; pragmatic information and…

This study analyzed verbal responses of status unequals in situations where a linguistic mistake occurred. Subjects were 80 native Turkish-speaking university students (28 males, 52 females) who participated in role-playing exercises using such situations. Two aspects of the responses were investigated: the semantic and syntactic formulas that…

Focusing on children's production of written language, a two-year study, conducted on the Oodham (Papago) Indian Reservation in Arizona, explored social context, linguistic systems, and the creation of meaning as aspects of the writing process. Ten American Indian children in third and fourth grade provided over 200 stories that formed the basic…

It is the intent of this Master's Thesis to describe the nonstandard morphology and syntax of a representative sample of children in the Norfolk City schools. The description is organized according to the linguistic patterning of nonstandard English features and their social and ethnic distribution. The speech of both white and Negro children is…

The effect of teaching dialect-related writing skills to black, blue collar children in the fourth, seventh, and eleventh grades in comparison with similar white, blue collar students and white, white collar students was investigated. Eight operational hypotheses were developed and tested at the three grade levels. The data compared consisted of…