Discusses the Puerto Rican dialect and its peculiar placement of subject pronouns. Notes the linguistic variety in the dialect as well as its use of verbs connotating mental and communicative activity and constructions of relativity. These distinctions give rise to the functional hypothesis to account for the peculiarities of Spanish in the…

Presents an approach to face-to-face interaction grammar that aims to discover rules of interaction that interlocutors share and suggests that this approach is common to conversational analysis and context analysis. Case studies are presented of interaction structure in parent-child routines during the child's first year. (58 references) (CK)

A series of studies on 474 Colorado students (ages 7-18) with hearing impairments investigated the use of inference and elaboration, sequencing, and story-grammar strategies. The use of eight types of sequence/connection/cohesion strategies was examined. Results found that different strategies predominate depending on participants' age and degree…

Considers the role of instruction, second language (L2) input, first language (L1) transfer, and universal grammar in development of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge. Specifically investigates the acquisition of the Spanish morpheme "se" by English-speaking adult learners. (Author/VWL)

POSSE, an instructional procedure for a reading comprehension curriculum, structures classroom dialogue about text meaning. Students with mild handicaps predict what the story will be about, organize their knowledge, search for the text structure, summarize, and evaluate. POSSE's successful application is dependent upon effective lesson dialogue…

Discusses the importance of articulation in teaching English as a foreign language in elementary and secondary schools in Italy, focusing in particular on coordination in the teaching of grammar. (CFM)

Explores the few studies that compare the psycholinguistic processes characterizing second language acquisition in the classroom and native-speaking environments. A description of a study that found that, although intermediate Spanish students extensively monitored language usage in both environments, their monitored knowledge was still quite…

Assesses verb phrase development in three Trinidadian children in which Standard English and Trinidad Creole coexist. Adverbials were found to be crucial in delineating specific areas of semantic intent. (20 references) (GLR)

Speech production gains made by hearing-impaired children (aged 3-7) in a training program incorporating tactual vocoders were compared with gains made by 15 comparison children. The 11 subjects showed gains in syllable inventories and pronunciation of vocabulary items; in another study, 7 subjects exhibited gains in grammatical development.…

Uses miscue analysis to find patterns of reader strategies on two types of texts: a syntactically complex/high vocabulary newspaper editorial; and a syntactically simple/low vocabulary editorial. Suggests that teachers should guide students to focus on the contextual relationships found both within and beyond the sentence level. (MG)

In a French study based on Spanish research, the communicative effectiveness and grammatical accuracy of foreign language students in generating appropriate classroom questions was investigated. Despite language differences, similarities were found in communication errors, especially incorrect interrogative words and structures, verb tenses and…

Encourages the use of storytelling in the classroom as a method for developing verbal, written, and reading skills, as well as non-verbal communication skills. Offers guidelines and specific activities for involving students in storytelling. (RAE)

Through story grammar instruction, low-achieving students are discovering that literature can be fun to read and perhaps have application to their own lives. (Author/TE)

A review of recent research concerning the syntactical and grammatical characteristics of business German precedes an exploration of the occurrence and sequencing of these characteristics in American college textbooks. Particular attention is given to the passive voice. (Author/CB)

Focuses on the teaching of grammar in foreign language learning situations. Drawing the learners' attention to the linguistic patterns and providing them with the underlying rules and principles can enhance the learning process as learners usually try to discover rules from the language data by themselves. (71 references) (CK)