Describes a teaching method for vocabulary development based on word formation by means of affixes. Discusses inflectional and derivational suffixes, prefixes, and their meaning. Offers examples of practice materials and of receptive and productive tests. (MES)

Describes the components of the writing course at York College of the City University of New York, focusing particularly on the writing laboratory with its self-instructional methods and its 13 modules on grammatical features. (RL)

Reports on a study investigating the relationship between children's linguistic environment and language acquisition. In particular, the study examined the effect of mothers' speech on subsequent child speech. (Author/AM)

Describes the teaching methods of the Yazigi Institutes of Brazil, which offer Portuguese instruction to foreigners. (JB)

Reports on the objectives and phases of a research project seeking to discover the relationship between grammar as learned in the native language and as learned in a second language. (AM)

Discusses the four areas involved in communicative competence (knowledge of mechanical rules, meaningful rules, appropriacy, and nonlinguistic conventions) and to what extent it is possible or desirable to teach communicative competence to nonnative speakers of English. (CFM)

Examines complaints made by 40 high school principals with respect to three aspects of their schools' newspapers: preponderance of negative news stories, flagrant violation of grammar and spelling rules, and gross neglect of finances. (GT)

All the irregularities of all common French verbs are reduced to five categories in the "passe simple." This system facilitates learning the tense without memorizing each irregular verb independently. (PMJ)

Subjects with internal or external locus of control were instructed to remeber as much as possible from an array of letter strings generated from a finite state grammar. While both groups attended to the exemplars, internals extracted more invariance and hence learned more about the underlying grammatical structure. (Author/SJL)

Discusses a French course designed to help students learn the dynamics of good writing and become sensitive to style. The approach to teaching writing relies on in-class editing of compositions that students produce on a weekly basis. (NCR)

Presents a language-awareness (LA) perspective on the concept of autonomy in second-language learning. The article distinguishes between two kinds of LA, examines child development and the role played by metalinguistic knowledge and literacy in first-language acquisition and examines the role played by both kinds of LA in second-language pedagogy.…

A study involving three males (age 13) with learning disabilities investigated the effectiveness of using story mapping for teaching elements of the story form. The instructional procedure positively affected the number of story elements included in students' recall of stories when they were explicitly taught to use it in reading. (Author/CR)

Discusses using portfolios to evaluate the writing, vocabulary, and grammar of students with deafness. Describes the steps for student development and assembly of their portfolios for presentation and review. Also highlights student participation in the assessment of the portfolios and the benefits of portfolios. (CR)

Investigates specific writing skills of both native and nonnative business students to see whether traditional instruction in grammar prepares students for business communication classes and the corporate world. Finds that, although most students passed objective grammar and punctuation tests (and the two groups showed no statistical differences),…

Discusses arguments that support the position regarding the distribution of non-grammatical markings of negation and of "wh"-scope and emphasizes the importance of looking for deep unifying principles in cross-modal studies of American Sign Language in order to further understanding of Universal Grammar. (33 references) (Author/CK)