Sixty-five grade 5-6 children were tested on a verbal recall task involving material of varying semantic and syntactic content. There was no difference between best and poorest readers in their performance on random lists of words, but there were clear differences on meaningful sentences and on syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous…

This publication reviews significant research in 1969 in the field of oral language in early childhood and reading. In general the paper discusses only those areas where these three topics intersect; thus detailed treatment is given only to language in early childhood education and language in relation to reading. Initial comments deal with…

Some insight into the relationship between language and thought can be achieved through a comparison between American Sign Language and English. This paper discusses several studies on this topic and defines some of the problems. The author feels that the deaf using American Sign Language cannot be considered linguistically deficient. A structural…

Present school programs place considerable reliance on the results of standardized language tests both as placement and diagnostic devices, yet the validity of these tests is open to question. Certain questions arise in light of current theory and research. To what extent are currently available measuring techniques useful for identifying the…

Spontaneous speech performance of ethnically diverse children was investigated by linguistic measures and teacher evaluations. Interview data was collected from 144 elementary school children, comprising equal white, Chicano, and black subsamples evenly divided among lower and higher grades. Speech evaluators were 60 white teachers. Analyses…

The objectives of this study were to examine a body of data collected by five graduate students at the University of Texas at San Antonio and to determine, after a careful analysis of the transcribed utterances, whether all instances of language alternations can be truly considered code-switching strategies and whether those that can be so…

The two articles in this newsletter issue focus on and discuss the multiple intelligences (MI) theory and its application in schools. Developed by Howard Gardner at Harvard University, the theory argues that individuals differ in their abilities, learning styles, and interests, and that these differences need to be acknowledged and nurtured in…

The Aural Grammar Test was designed to assess aural grammatical competence for language presented in a formal situation. The subjects used in this initial development of the test were 147 Toronto high school students learning French as a second language. The test is described and the results are interpreted in terms of both the explicit and…

This paper empirically examines one aspect of Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of educational failure, a code thesis wherein a restricted code is defined as giving access only to "particularistic" meanings and an elaborated code is defined as giving access also to "universalistic" meanings. According to Bernstein,…

A study was conducted to assess the ability of children to distinguish native from non-native English and to determine the age at which they reach the adult level of recognition ability. A brief passage containing the segmental phonemes of English was recorded by ten native and ten non-native speakers of Standard American English. The tape was…

Communicative competence, the ability to use a language effectively in unrehearsed transactions with native speakers, must be the ultimate goal of language teaching. Drills and repetition of patterned phrases do not, in and of themselves, lead to real language use. We should begin giving students opportunities to use language in unrehearsed,…

The acquisition of Standard English by speakers of other languages and by speakers of non-standard dialects seems to differ (1) in motivation, (2) in the perception of Standard English, (3) in the social significance of Standard English, (4) in the cultural heritage and its influence on man's identity and self-respect, (5) in the source…

Ausubel distinguishes two kinds of human learning: (1) rote learning, relevant only to a small fraction of human learning, is the mechanistic formation of discrete, isolated traces in cognitive structure, usually through a process of conditioning; (2) meaningful learning, characteristic of most human learning, is a process of "subsuming"…

This project seeking to develop sound methodological research techniques for second-language is based on an initial pilot study which (1) identified and classifies the utterances of a child learning Spanish as a second language, and (2) determines whether there are any significant trends in the observed order of learning of kernels and transformed…

Through an experiment investigating the processes used by several speakers of Asian languages to decode passages by speakers of Australian English, this paper seeks to establish and categorize the types of problems encountered by multilingual speakers when decoding the speech of monolingual speakers in one of their (the multilinguals') second…