This lesson uses a text about the houseboats of Kashmir to give students practice with descriptions, compound words, and participles. The lesson plan could be adapted to tourist destinations familiar to the students. Students are asked to write a description of their homes and create a tourism brochure for their own cities or towns.

Public speaking can be very threatening to any native speakers of English, not to mention non-native EFL learners. Impromptu speech, perhaps the most challenging form of public speaking, is however being promoted in every city of the EFL countries. The case in Taiwan is no exceptional. Every year, dozens of impromptu speech contexts are held…

This article considers the comprehension of tense-aspect markers remote past BIN and habitual be by 3- to 5-year-old developing African American English (AAE)-speaking children and their Southwest Louisiana Vernacular English (SwLVE)-speaking peers. Overall both groups of children associated BIN with the distant past; however, the AAE-speaking…

In making decisions regarding the focus for grammar teaching, ESL instructors may take into consideration errors that appear to result from the influence of their students' first language(s) (L1). There is also evidence from language acquisition research suggesting that for some grammatical features, learners of different L1 backgrounds may face…

The fastest growing Hispanic population centers in the United States are currently in the Southeast. In one Georgia community, immigrant children from Mexico, Central America, and South America use Spanish and English together in sentences. This paper compares the bilingual structures of sentences that show codeswitching between Spanish and…

Purpose: This 5-year longitudinal study investigated the acquisition of 6 English grammatical morphemes (i.e., regular and irregular past tense, 3rd person singular, progressive aspect-"ing", copula BE, and auxiliary DO) by 10 native Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents in the United States (arrived in the United States between 5…

The paper reviewed studies in word-level processing skills and related areas, and profiled how the development of L2 word recognition and integration skills would contribute to autonomous "kango" (Chinese originated words or words created from Chinese originated words) vocabulary learning. Despite the fact that the acquisition of a…

Through discussion and illustrative events, an evolving segment of communication is described during the course of transition of one child's total communication system from the sensorimotor or gestural level at 12 months into the level of use of the adult words "more" and "mine," and associated utterances, at 24 months. (Author/RM)

Paper presented May 1973, Dresden, East Germany. (DD)

This study examines the relative contributions of rote-memorization, analogic formation and rule-operation in the production of plurals. Rule-operation was found to be important in that children producing responses characteristic of a given stage did not produce responses for later stages. Contributions of analogic formation and rote-memorization…

Major findings are reported of a longitudinal, naturalistic study of grammatical morpheme development in an aphasic child from 5;5 to 6;1. The majority of the morphemes were not acquired in the same order nor at the same mean length of utterance (MLU) levels reported for normal children. As an alternative to the normal acquisition model, based on…

Psycholinguistic knowledge and techniques can be used as the basis for reading process research with a view to the development of a reading theory. The initial phase of such a study is reported, and reading behavior on a comprehensive basis is examined. The assumption upon which the research is based is that reading miscues are generated by the…

The use of linguistic principles in selecting reading materials is relatively recent. Several years ago at Wayne State University, over 200 principles were identified as possible criteria for the selection of materials. About 50 of these were linguistic principles, some of which conflicted with the others. Descriptive linguistics seems, at…

The tone-changing rules in Central (Standard) Thai are traditionally analyzed as having five contrasting tones--mid, low, high, falling, and rising. (Abramson's graph of the fundamental frequency variations for single vowel Thai syllables illustrates these five tones.) Theoretically, each tone may be part of any Thai syllable. Any Thai syllable…

This paper discusses the term "language universal" and posits a definition of a "counter-universal." It is proposed that the voiced aspirates of Bario Kelabit represent an exception to a posited phonological behavioral universal and are an important addition to the inventory of possible phonetic segments. (AM)