Providing information to help develop students' sense of narrative and to show them specific test-taking strategies, this publication is helpful to teachers as they ready their students for the North Carolina Fourth Grade Writing Assessment. The publication provides materials on generating ideas for writing, selecting topics, revising, developing…

An integrated analysis of the syntax and semantics of serial verb constructions (SVCs) in a group of West African languages is presented. With data from Dagaare and closest relatives, a structural definition for SVCs is developed (two or more lexical verbs that share grammatical categories within a clause), establishing SVCs as complex predicates.…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT: LEVEL: High school and college. AUTHOR'S COMMENT: Many would like to abandon the distinction between "lay" and "lie," but I still receive enough questions about it to continue teaching it. Finding that students did not believe me when I taught them to substitute…

The book is an attempt to create an appreciation of the complex Lushootseed language, spoken by American Indians in the area between Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains northward to the Skagit River Valley. The book is divided into two parts: readings about Lushootseed life and a brief description of the Lushootseed language. The readings, taken…

The experimental evidence on the value of a sentence-combining approach to improving reading comprehension is still sparse, but the possibilities seem rich.

Shows the limitations of current foreign language teaching methods, particularly the audiolingual one. Unites certain findings of psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and transformational grammar to construct a language teaching model. Examples of English verbs and nominals being taught to French children illustrate the…

For the teaching of English beyond the elementary level, a lesson plan for beginners is presented and discussed. In the center of the proposed lesson plan are, among other things, cooperative exercises ("individual pupils asking and answering questions of each other"), as well as exercises in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation (voiced/voiceless…

Contrary to the pattern of many changes in French usage, the gradual loss of "ne" follows a continum from speakers who always omit it to those who never do, and considerable divergence may be shown in familiar versus formal language. Qualitative and quantitative perspectives are examined. (Text is in French.) (Author/MSE)

This description of "Introduction to College Composition," a credit-bearing developmental writing course offered by the Community College of the Finger Lakes, provides an overview of the writing, grammar skills, and reading components of the course. Introductory information indicates that the course adopts a process-oriented approach to…

Sixteen subjects with autism and 16 with Down Syndrome (aged 5 to 27), matched on verbal mental age, watched a short puppet show or video skit and were then asked to tell the story to a listener and answer follow-up questions. The majority of both groups were able to produce recognizable, though primitive, narratives. The groups did not differ in…

A vast amount of reading comprehension research was reported in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The study reported in this paper used the basal reading programs considered by California for adoption in 1988 as a vehicle for examining how the comprehension research had affected basal materials. Five series that were completely new and that…

Focusing on conversational stories of personal experience (SPEs), this paper explores the narrative skills of preschool-aged black children in a low-income, urban community. Although linguistic and anthropological work attest to a flourishing tradition of story telling among black adults, little is known about the ways in which children become…

Intended for practitioners, this study has three principal aims: (1) to reduce the breadth of formal grammar instruction by first locating those areas where grammar and writing overlap and then identifying those kinds of writing problems most amenable to treatment with a grammar-based approach; (2) to decrease the classroom hours spent on formal…