The Bilingual Oral Language Test (BOLT-English) was pilot tested in January 1976, field tested in April 1976, and again in October, November 1976, on a population of more than 3,000 students in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pomona, Riverside, and Palm Springs, California. Results reported include concurrent validity values of .9 and .86 when…

Communicative competence in a given language is not guaranteed by competency in the understanding and use of linguistic structures. As part of the testing corpus of an individual's communicative competence in a second language, an oral proficiency interview may provide some insight into the individual's communicative ability in a variety of…

Errors made by first and second year university students are grouped into categories and means for dealing with these errors are suggested. The article is divided into six parts. The introduction includes information about: (1) the linguistic background of the students and the university staff, (2) the educational system, (3) some language…

Based on the belief that learning can take place in the home as well as in the school, this booklet was developed as a means of helping parents contribute to the improvement of their children's oral communication skills. Various sections of the booklet contain the following: (1) a discussion of children's communication behaviors, including an…

Serving as an introduction to a conference for Australian educators on developing oral communication skills, this paper reviews current methods of teaching speech skills. The paper describes a basic approach that holds that a learner's improved use of a skill is related to the number of satisfying experiences the learner has using the skill. It…

Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical applications of research are included in this status report for the April 1-June 30, 1980, period. The reports deal with the following topics: (1) the perceptual equivalent of two acoustic cues for a speech contrast is specific to phonetic…

Through oral languaging children learn to share ideas, to shape ideas, to structure thought, and to develop thinking skills. In order to plan appropriate and effective oral communication environments, teachers need to be aware of the factors that shape and influence communication environments or situations. There are three scales or continua of…

The effects of small group versus large group instruction in improving the oral language of 40 language delayed preschoolers were examined. Results of scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Preschool Language Scale indicated that small group instruction appeared to improve the Ss' oral language performance, regardless of sex or age.…

E. D. Hirsch's "Philosophy of Composition" (in press) reintroduces to communication theorists the "progress of language" thesis first developed, by Henry Bradley and Otto Jespersen around 1900, in the context of oral language. The thesis states that languages--English in particular--tend to become more simplified and flexible…

Reviews current approaches to testing oral competence at 16plus and suggests some less artificial alternatives. (AA)

Proposes a more explicit description for reported speech in English grammars and English as a second language textbooks, with emphasis on: a clear differentiation between direct and indirect speech using prosodic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic criteria; the role of deixis in explaining the internal syntactic adjustments in indirect speech;…

Rated speech phrasality scores of 40 deaf students (ages 4-17) were correlated to their reading comprehension scores according to four oral word groupings: whole sentences, phrases, nonmeaningful fragmented word groups, and single words. Among results was phrasal speaker superiority in comprehending phrased material in response to factual (not…

Communicative oral language tests have claimed high content validity, but have also elicited concern that the assessment scales are based on theory with little empirical justification. A new approach to construct validity can be found in discourse analysis, which could lead to the development of new communicative discourse tests in all skills. (CB)

A morphological analysis of a French language corpus focuses on patterns of truncation, shortened versions of multisyllabic words, in modern spoken usage and in the language used in newspapers. Specific examples of truncation are included.(MSE)

Accuracy-disabled and rate-disabled young Canadian readers were compared to children who were "fluent normal" readers. Children in the latter group decoded at the same level of accuracy as the rate-disabled subjects but at a significantly faster rate. Specific deficiencies of each of the disabled groups were identified. (Author/RH)