The compositions of 49 students (ages 10-14) with deafness or hearing impairments and 49 typical students were compared to investigate the frequency and proportional distribution of written-language variables. Differences were found between the strategies chosen by the students with deafness or hearing impairments in both syntax and semantics and…

Nine papers from a British conference on applied linguistics are compiled in this report. Introductory comments point out the traditional primacy of spoken language while acknowledging the demand for literacy and the importance of the written mode. Papers and authors are as follows: "An Educational Theory of (Written) Language" (Michael Stubbs);…

Writing samples representing argumentation, exposition, narration, and description were gathered from 51 fifth-grade pupils. Significant differences were found among the four modes of writing and among high-, medium-, and low-ability groups for T-unit length, clauses per T-unit, and clause length. Argumentation produced the most complex writing,…

Analyzed the spoken and written language of Caribbean college students who consider themselves to be native speakers of English. Discusses the students' linguistic self-perception as well as the morphosyntactic and discourse features that emerge when they write in standard English. The study suggests that anglophone Caribbean students should be…

A commonly held belief is that language is an aspect of the biological system since the capacity to acquire language is innate and evolved along Darwinian lines. Written language, on the other hand, is thought to be an artifact and a surrogate of speech; it is, therefore, neither natural nor biological. This disparaging view of written language,…

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

This study investigates the effect of mode of expression on the syntactic complexity of writing produced by third-grade children. Approximately 200 samples of writing in the modes of argumentation, exposition, narration, and description were collected from 50 third graders in the Atlanta school district. Syntactic complexity, as measured by length…

To determine the variety of syntactic patterns that potential English teachers would normally use and the possible differences in their oral and written discourse, 1000-word oral and written language samples were collected from 21 student teachers. These samples were divided into T-units and classified according to 23 sentence patterns based on…

Investigates why graduates of Arabic courses in English-speaking countries are so few in number and why they so often compare poorly in spoken language performance with graduates of other language courses. The most important factor in this phenomenom is the gap that separates written Arabic from spoken Arabic. (SED)

Ninth grade remedial readers at a suburban Chicago high school were given a language development program which included reading while listening to tapes and lessons in syntactic manipulation. Analysis of program effects showed that students improved their ability to understand and manipulate syntactic structures. Reading did not improve markedly.…

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…

Translating legal and bureaucratic language into plain, comprehensible English is not amenable to simple rules and procedures. Rewriting comprehensibly requires specialized knowledge about language and an awareness of a number of misconceptions and pitfalls. This paper discusses what not to do in rewriting, based upon rewritten documents presently…

Data delimited by the phonology-to-semantics framework of mainstream linguistics are inadequate to account for the subtle influences of first language (L1) upon second language (L2). Unique errors for which there is no L1 correlate are found in samples of written English produced by Japanese and Chinese second language learners. This is due to a…

In recent years, T-unit analysis has been applied in second language research to characterize the syntactic nature of linguistic input and to assess the syntactic maturity of the learners' written production. This measure has been seen to provide an objective and reliable method of determining the overall complexity of language samples. However,…

Starting with a model for explaining comprehension and noncomprehension of verbal material in terms of a match/mismatch principle, this project developed a scale of language usage and explored hypotheses about how comprehension may become possible if a child does not now comprehend some particular oral or written text. Eight separate reports are…