This book of supplemental exercises is one of a series of books designed to provide educational materials in addition to the instructional texts in the Adult Learning Skills Program. Exercises in this intermediate level book are for the English subject area. Course numbers and exercise topics are: 701 (subject/verb agreement, reversed subject…

A study, investigating the patterns in which Chinese learners of English as a second language (ESL) learn English interrogative structures, focused on four major classes of English questions (yes/no, wh-, alternative, and embedded) categorized into seven structural types. Data came from a test requiring rapid translation of 55 Chinese questions.…

A study investigating favorable and unfavorable contexts for learning some word order rules in Swedish as a second language is reported. The rules examined are subject-verb inversion after a preposed non-subject in main clauses and the rules for placement of the negative particle. Subjects were 60 adult native speakers of Finnish, Polish, and…

One hundred thirty-nine college students participated in an experiment designed to examine the basis of their abilities to make relative importance distinctions among ideas in a text while reading. Subjects read two texts of 13 paragraphs each. The topics of the two texts were unrelated, but their topic structure was similar. For each of the…

Both sentence length and sentence complexity of various kinds of newspaper prose were examined in a study to determine (1) ways newspaper prose differs from the prose of books native English speaking students chose to read and enjoy reading and (2) whether there are features of newspaper prose other than vocabulary and a lack of international news…

When intermediate and advanced students of English as a second language (ESL) begin an English composition course, they face the task of creating logical extended discourses in English. Often, while the sentences they create are free from obvious grammatical errors, they are stylistically unacceptable, vague in meaning, misrepresentative of the…

The acquisition of the passive sentence structure by 36 adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) was studied. Twelve learners each spoke Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish as their native language. For each language group, four were beginners, four intermediates, and four advanced learners of English. All were studying English at the…

A collection of papers on sentence constituents occurring in the sentence-initial position in a variety of Central and South American languages includes: "Consitutent Order, Cohesion, and Staging in Gaviao" (Horst Stute); "Focus and Topic in Xavante" (Eunice Burgess); "Sentence-Initial Elements in Brazilian Guarani"…

Eighteen fourth grade students and twenty sixth grade students participated in a study to determine if there was a significant difference in the quality of written composition among students exposed to the peer editing process as opposed to those exposed to teacher editing. The control group consisted of 8 fourth grade students and 10 sixth grade…

A system for classifying English predicates into four families that account for all forms, moods, voices, and tenses is examined as an approach to teach grammar to students of English as a second language (ESL). It is suggested that by focusing on one family at a time, then building by combining these families, students can learn more readily to…

An interest in conditions of practice and feedback led to a study which examined the effect on writing by elementary school students of (1) two types of practice, both similar to "free focused writing"; (2) practice at a frequency greater than once a week; and (3) a procedure by which students measured their own performance and provided themselves…

A study was conducted to determine the relationship between processing load and ability to locate text segments containing intersentence contradictions. It was hypothesized that less able readers fail to exhibit comprehension monitoring skills because most tasks overload their processing capacity. Subjects were 87 fourth and sixth grade students…

This study examines the effects of different kinds of verbal instructions given by teachers on the performance of young children, investigating whether task performance is significantly affected by small changes in verbal content or in the sequence of components of an instruction. Kindergarten children (48 boys and 52 girls) were randomly assigned…

Noting that the lack of prosodic information in printed text may be a source of difficulty for children who are learning to read, this paper explores the features of language underlying the acoustic and perceptual segmentation of sentences into meaningful units. Using evidence from studies in speech production and perception, the paper addresses…

The purpose of this guide is to assist Latin and English teachers with some background in Latin to expand the English vocabulary and reading skills of students through the study of Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes. The introductory material in the guide provides general notes on the teaching of Latin in the Philadelphia School District,…