An English for Special Purposes (ESP) course being developed aims to give the students a series of techniques to help them handle vocabulary in a text, and teach them strategies for identifying meaning in context. Traditional strategies, such as the study of morphology, use of grammatical information, and exercises in dictionary usage, are…

Individual approaches to the reading and study of 14 modern poems that have proved their worth and appeal to adolescents are offered in this publication. The poems--by such poets as Marianna Moore, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, and Robinson Jeffers--are reprinted; and each is followed by a discussion in which a high school teacher…

To develop a simple, inexpensive technique to quantify speech comprehension of pupils (aged 7 to 13) in special schools for the deaf, the verbal responses to pictures by 111 pupils were judged for intelligibility by untrained listeners. Pupils were asked to identify 30 pictures; their taped replies were judged by listeners who wrote down what they…

That semantics interacts with syntax has been shown in psycholinguistic investigations of the processing of language by adults and of the acquisition of language by children. The few programs for language assessment and therapy that have attempted to incorporate semantic considerations have included some misunderstandings of the psycholinguistic…

Multiple-choice standardized achievement tests of English vocabulary and reading comprehension and of mathematics were administered to samples of 592 grade eight students and 615 grade five students. Two forms of each test unit were prepared. The control groups took forms containing items with four responses, while the experimental groups took…

This demonstration project provides intensive instruction in reading and mathematics to selected fifth graders in the 1974-75 year and for selected fifth and sixth graders in 1975-76, in order to raise the reading and mathematics performance of underachievers to a level commensurate with measured ability. Aimed at the intermediate teacher in…

This is the fourth in a series of technical research reports by Harvard Project Zero which study artistic creation and comprehension as a means toward better art education. This particular study examines children's sensitivity to musical styles. Twenty children at age levels ranging from 6 through 19 years participated in the study which measured…

In 1965 the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) inaugurated a cross-national survey of achievement in six subjects: Science, Reading Comprehension, Literature, English as a Foreign Language, French as a Foreign Language, and Civic Education. The overall aim of the project was to use international tests in…

Four- and six-year language programs emphasizing the development of listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural understanding are outlined in this guide. Major sections cover guiding principles in the development of the foreign language curriculum, teaching techniques, and evaluation. Subclassified materials include coverage…

This Pennsylvania study investigated whether functionally illiterate adults in a face-to-face adult basic education (ABE) program using instructional television (ITV) show greater achievement gains than those in similar programs without ITV. Achievement data were drawn from raw scores on Level I, Form A (pretest), and Level I, Form B, (posttest),…

A 3-year project focused on problems related to teaching reading in content areas in secondary schools. The project was sponsored by the United States Office of Education and supported 10 doctoral students in their doctoral studies, eight interns, a graduate assistant, and a research student. Six interrelated doctoral dissertations were completed…

The purpose of these studies was to develop and demonstrate a model for identifying criterion levels of performance that can be rationally defended as being the best level of performance for a particular instructional task. The specific objective was to identify the score on a cloze test that represents the most desirable level of performance on…

The relevance to elementary foreign language instruction of certain findings of child language development (native language) and the psychology of language acquisition is examined. A set of premises is proposed for a new scheme for the teaching of German based on these findings, namely, that comprehension precedes production, that language…

The present study deals with two language skills, listening and speaking, and it is limited to single consonant phonemes only. The purpose is to try to find answers to the following problems: (1) Which Finnish consonants are given as substitutes for English consonants by Finnish pupils who have no previous (or practically no previous) knowledge of…

Most students of English as a Foreign Language at University level find it confusing to read professional material in their field of study. Their confusion stems not only from their lack of training in reading comprehension but also from their inability to recognize or to distinguish between certain grammatical constructions. It is suggested that…