Armenian as a separate language has been thought as an I-E Language, but what language/s are the closest to Armenian? We made an attempt to compare Armenian words with Ukrainian, Slavic and European Languages contrasting the stems to some Iranian Languages, like Tajik, Dari and Persian, to see how relative Armenian could be to them. Our main goal…

This booklet describes the Urdu writing system, and is part of a series of teaching materials for teaching Urdu. A general introduction outlining the main characteristics of the system is followed by a presentation of the alphabet. Letters symbolizing the same sound are then discussed, followed by the vowels. Non-connectors, or letters not having…

Investigations of Japanese speakers' interlanguage constructions of English existential sentences with a locative sentential topic found a general shift from topic-comment to subject-predicate structures as proficiency increased. (24 references) (Author/CB)

After a discussion of the limitations of early contrastive rhetoric theory and the need for a richer view that considers different cultures, this article reports on a survey of Japanese and Arabic English-as-a-Second-Language students to examine how writing is taught in different cultures. Differing emphases on expressive and transactional…

This study investigated the relationships between phonological awareness and reading in Oriya and English. Oriya is the official language of Orissa, an eastern state of India. The writing system is an alphasyllabary. Ninety-nine fifth grade children (mean age 9 years 7 months) were assessed on measures of phonological awareness, word reading and…

The extent to which the second-language English spelling of young Welsh-English bilinguals is systematically idiosyncratic was examined from free compositions written by 10- to 11-year-old children. A model is presented of the second-language spelling process in the form of a "decision tree." (Contains 29 references.) (Author/LB)

Suggests that the powerful role of the single character in the establishment of a memory network for reading skills be an inherent part of nonnative Chinese Mandarin reading programs. Through this technique, students come to understand lexical relationships between characters in words and will develop their powers of memorability. (nine…

Explores aspects of linguistic variation and change in written Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin/creole that is spoken in Papua New Guinea as a second language by over 1,5000,000 people and as a first language by over 20,000 people.(Author/VWL)

Drawing from the study of efforts to revitalize Quichua in the Southern Ecuadorian Highlands, this article describes what may be some of the common language corpus and language status transformations that threatened languages undergo during the process of language revitalization. (Author/VWL)

The question of the sequencing of skills is an important issue in language policy and curriculum design in general, and even more so in the case of a diglossic language such as Arabic. This paper tries to investigate the implications of diglossia on the order of linguistic skills acquisition in Arabic among Hebrew speakers in Israel. (JL)

Examination of examples of "Nigerian English" in novels by two prominent Nigerian authors reveals such linguistic behavior as translating directly from Nigerian languages, stressing least effort and economy of expression, incorporating sociocultural logic and imperatives of the Nigerian environment, and displaying "hypercorrected…

This guide is intended for speakers of the Chippewa (Ojibwa) language who read and write in English but would like to develop their reading and writing skills in Chippewa. The writing system used is one developed by Charles Fiero and is only one of many possible standardized writing systems for Chippewa. It was selected by the Chippewa Language…

Demonstrates the use of a multivariate technique known as logit analysis, applying it to authentic data drawn from Juurakko (1996) which studies the influences of the source language and the target language on the use of prepositions in Finnish pupils' learner Swedish. The interlanguage data for the analysis consist of essays written in Swedish by…

Analysis of research involving reading comprehension ability in a second language shows that problems with illocutionary force, logical connectors, and modifiers indicate that many students are either unable to draw on a culturally appropriate memory schema for reading comprehension or have preconceived notions about word meaning that prevent them…

Examines rhetoric, and specifically evaluation, in three sets of published economics articles: one in Danish, one by the same authors in English, and a third by international authors from the same journals as the second. Found Danish norms in terms of some features, such as use of personal pronouns. However, such features are within the norms of…