Papers from the 1998 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium include: "Patterns of Gender Agreement in the Speech of Second Language Learners"; "'Nomas' in Mexican American Dialect"; "Parsing Spanish 'solo'"; "On Levels of Processing and Levels of Comprehension"; "The Role of Attention in Second/Foreign Language Classroom Research: Methodological Issues";…

This manual is designed for the language training of Peace Corps volunteers serving in Samoa, and focuses on daily communication skills needed in that context. It consists of 48 lessons, which include targeted competencies, phrase and vocabulary lists, cultural and usage notes, notes on grammar, and exercises. Lesson topics include: the Samoan…

Discussions in speech and language pathology often contain references to language differences and the ways these differences compare with speech and language disorders. There is ongoing research on the regional varieties of English, and within the past decade, information on social and ethnic variation in language has been accumulating. Based on…

After a critical examination of four assumptions of current procedures in language assessment, it is argued that the pragmatic domain of language ability should be the first to be assessed. A study designed to determine the usefulness of language variation (the number of different structures a child can produce or comprehend) as an alternative…

Three similar experiments were conducted to assess language variation and politeness in the speech of English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children, and in Armenian children learning English as a second language. Each experiment elicited request strategies from the children with the use of puppets in a structured conversation. While…

This monograph on minority languages and bilingualism focuses on seven minority languages in different parts of the world, looking at their history and current status, including patterns of usage among samples of their speakers. The first two chapters discuss several issues regarding diglossia and bilingualism, language patterns within societies,…

The construction of an intermediate course in Mandarin Chinese for business purposes is discussed. Following an introduction in part one, part two considers the progress of trade relations between Taiwan, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and the United States. Part three gives a brief review of materials already in print that might help in…

Dialect writing in nineteenth-century America has been used as a source of evidence about popular American language and culture. Works employing dialect have been studied as documents embodying perceptions of the relation between character, role, and moral values on the one hand, and speech variety on the other. Critics have noticed the difference…

This study describes the syntactic features of Black English Vernacular (BEV) spoken by black characters in three black situation comedies on American television: "The Jeffersons,""Good Times," and "What's Happening." Using scripts and audio tapes of three episodes from each series during the 1977-78 television season, transcripts were made of…

The purpose of the study reported here was: (1) to determine whether any predictable relationships exist between the spoken language patterns of individuals and those individuals' ethnic attitudes; and (2) to identify the degree of association present among various selected demographic factors, language patterns, and ethnic attitudes. The…

What has been labelled mainstream dialectology has been criticized soundly on theoretical grounds, yet mainstream dialectologists have responded with the assertion that their critics have not been intimately familiar with dialect methodology and are therefore not qualified to criticize. Claiming that while theoretical issues are far from being…

This research report deals with the transformations of stimulus sentences that primary grade speakers of Hawaii Creole English (HCE) made when they were asked to repeat sentences said to them in Standard English. The test used was the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) Standard English Repetition Test (SERT) which was administered to the 21…

A role-playing procedure for elicitation of speech acts was designed to study aspects of the communicative competence of second language learners, namely, their language variation with respect to deference when the age and sex of the addressee are systematically manipulated. Sixteen Spanish-speaking adult learners of English as a second language…

A collection of 17 papers, most presented at the Fifth International Conference on Contrastive Projects in June 1982 in Finland, includes: "Present Trends in Contrastive Linguistics,""Contrastive Linguistics in Bulgaria,""Communicative Competence in Foreign Language Teaching: A Project Report,""From Traditional…

An approach to translation is discussed which takes into account the sociolinguistic factors involved in a translated document designed for use with a linguistically, culturally and educationally heterogeneous population, such as the U.S. Spanish-heritage community. The translation project described resulted in the Spanish-language questionnaire…