Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

Students feel more comfortable in a new language when they understand its jokes. And when the jokes are puns, they build metalinguistic awareness. This article describes four categories of English puns--soundalike puns, lookalike puns, close-sounding puns, and texting puns--and suggests how they can be incorporated into English language…

This paper reports an intervention study on Singapore primary five (fifth Grade) students' ICT (information and communication technology)-mediated Chinese idiom learning. We introduced "seamless learning" to the learning design, that is, the bridging of formal and informal learning, and individual and social learning, conforming to the…

Ways in which to use "picture talk" (proverbs, similes, idioms, and witcracks) in language arts activities for elementary school students are described, including: writing and illustrating expressions; changing expressions; and interpreting expressions. (CB)

To make a spelling program more effective, use the children's spelling tests to analyse their errors and indicate spelling patterns. (JH)

Describes a technique for getting students acquainted which involves having them coin words based on each other's first names. (DD)

Reading success will be encouraged if children are given ample opportunity to verbally respond to first-hand experiences. (JH)

Focuses upon the importance of understanding the consequences of the "myth, masking, and mode" in guiding the language development of black disadvantaged children; based upon a paper presented before the Niagara Linguistic Frontier. (RD)

Defining regularity in the English language is not a straightforward matter because of the complex relations between sound and spelling. Predictable patterns are those spellings that can be readily predicted from pronunciation. Rare and unpredictable spellings are found only in a small set of words--probably 10% or less of the vocabulary in…

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…

Describes the use of language analysis and speech-act categories (declarations, assertives, directives, commissives, and expressives) to deal with meaningful classroom concerns, thereby enabling the teacher and students to work more effectively together. (KEH)

Language arts games are described that combine mathematical experiences and language development.

Of the various theories about how to treat black dialects, the approach by way of appreciating dialect differences is now in favor. (JH)