Of the four language skills, reading is probably tested most often, and it may seem to be the easiest to test. However, testing reading proficiency has its difficulties, and the test constructor must be aware of several issues. Reading involves a number of skills, and the number and complexity of these must be recognized. Choosing the text to test…

A study of two contemporary American novels, told in first-person narration, explored the distribution and function of relative clauses in literary narrative. For comparative purposes, data from oral conversation, 2 written expository works, 6 other novels, and 20 short oral narratives were also considered. Three types of relative clause are…

A study investigated the role of the interpreter in doctor-patient communication by analyzing four complete medical interviews at a large urban hospital, each involving one of two Russian interpreters on staff. Both interpreters were native Russian speakers recently immigrated to the United States. Patients were middle-aged and elderly immigrants…

A study investigated the ways in which native and non-native speakers of Kiswahili close conversations. Native speaker data were obtained from observation and field notes, recorded face-to-face interactions, recorded telephone conversations, reconstructed dialogues, and televised plays. Non-native speaker (American) data were drawn from role-play…

This essay provides teachers and others with an awareness of the social and political implications of words used to designate indigenous peoples of North America. How a group is seen by others and how it sees itself in many ways define the conditions under which the group will live, and the options it can exercise to affect these conditions. The…

A study focused attention on the academic personas acquired by two AAVE-oriented (African American Vernacular English) beginning writers as reflected by their speech in informal settings and the style they employed in academic tasks. The study explores the degree to which literacy experiences (home and school) affect students' lives. It was guided…

An analysis of the use of language in a social service context using microethnographic research techniques is described. The study examined a single interaction between a welfare caseworker and a client as they address the client's employment and educational options. The interaction was videotaped and a segment of just over a minute was analyzed…

This paper addresses the potential value of language-related criteria for use in identifying ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. A description of the way the Dutch government defines ethnic minority groups is followed by a comparative outline of the use of language-related criteria in countries with a longer tradition of immigration (Australia,…

A study compared the abilities of non-native speakers of English who have been in the United States for varying amounts of time with the ability of native speakers to perceive and produce primary stress at the phrase level. Subjects, all having at least 1 year of college education, were 10 native speakers of North American English, 6 native…

Indigenous languages are under siege, not only in the United States but also around the world, in danger of disappearing because they are not being transmitted to the next generation. Immigrants and their languages worldwide are similarly subject to seemingly irresistible social, political, and economic pressures. Yet, at a time when phrases such…

This document consists of the four issues of a newsletter entitled "Literacy Across the Curriculum" issued during 1990. The newsletter covers articles on classroom and other topical issues, resources, and conferences and announcements related to language for learning. The following topics are discussed in volume 6: analyzing…

This paper states that college radio invokes two ends of a language spectrum -- the clean language authorized for on-air use and the dirty language prohibited from such use, and that the interaction between the two produces "expositional obscenity," a catalytic form of discourse that invites the audience to render a judgment about…

Conversations between mothers and children from three different cultural groups were analyzed to determine culturally preferred narrative elicitation patterns. The three groups included Japanese-speaking mother-child pairs living in Japan, Japanese-speaking, mother-child pairs living in the United States, and English-speaking Canadian mother-child…

This article discusses language simplification as one aspect of a person's speech activity, and relates simplification to second language learning. Translation from language to language and translation within one language are processes through which a person, as decoder, decontextualizes a message form-sequence through perception of its…

This paper focuses on the issue of whether pedagogical mediation will facilitate the acquisition of conversational skills. It argues that it is possible to describe casual conversation, that it has a grammatical structure, and that it is of benefit to English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners for the structure of conversation to be explicitly…