A study examined the history of racial labelling of Black Americans, from the perspective of their changing material condition and opinions concerning use of the term "African American." Using the paradigm that language is representative of a social construction of reality drawn from linguistics and sociology, use of the terms…

A study investigated whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Three 6- to 8-year-old hearing-impaired children were administered the Grammatical Analysis of Elicited Language--Simple Sentence Level Test (GAEL), which is designed to evaluate hearing-impaired children's use of grammatical aspects of spoken and/or…

This "Manual of Style" is offered as a guide to assist Nebraska State employees in producing quality written communications and in presenting a consistently professional image of government documents. The manual is not designed to be all-inclusive. Sections of the manual discuss formatting documents, memorandums, letters, mailing…

This paper examines the differences between locative expressions in Kpelle and English, based on the dialect of one native speaker of Kpelle. It discusses the crucial role of the reference object in defining the meaning of locatives in Kpelle, in contrast to English, where the characteristics of the object to be located are less important. An…

Forensics program administration raises a number of troubling liability concerns. The potential liability exposure of forensics administrators may vastly exceed the litigation risks that arise as a result of ordinary teaching duties. Potential liability exposure may result from the failure of program directors to act in accordance with college or…

This paper presents three units of study and discusses ways that teachers can incorporate Kenneth Burke's ideas on symbolic action into the basic communication course. The three units discussed in the paper address: meaning in language and symbolic reality; persuasion; and rhetorical criticism. Each unit includes a brief introduction to the topic,…

Samuel Yette's "The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America" belongs to an honorable tradition of African American writing, a tradition which draws attention to a necessary distinction between the promise of freedom and democracy and what people actually experience in their everyday lives in the United States. Yette's language…

This study investigated how native Japanese speakers use honorifics in everyday social interaction. Honorifics are affixes, words, and formulaic phrases that follow linguistic and sociolinguistic rules and are believed to mark a speaker's politeness toward an addressee or another referenced person. The honorific system is incorporated into most…

Incorporating an understanding of different varieties of English (particularly Cajun English) and the appropriateness of their use into the language arts curriculum can help speakers of dialects understand the origins of their language and the significance it plays in their lives. Educators who work with students who use Cajun English need to be…

This paper expands on schematic theory through a review of recent work in the field of semiotics. Content and formal schemata are shown to be grounded respectively in perceptual (abductive) and indexical (inductive) strategies of inference. A third kind of schemata is based on deductive generalization and referred to as abstract schemata. All…

Writing teachers need to recognize the special circumstances of culturally displaced students. A specific category of such students are those from the Asian subcontinent, who are not exactly non-native speakers of English, but who do speak non-standard American English. These students occupy a subaltern (marginal) position: they can neither be…

Common problems encountered in teaching Chinese that involve classical, intentional malapropisms (learned errors) are discussed. Three aspects unique to Chinese are addressed: (1) since Chinese writing is logographic, some malapropisms occur because of similar graphs; (2) since many expressions come from classical Chinese, and instruction in…

Noting that intercultural understanding is a prime construct in the study of intercultural communication, this paper examines two questions that confront all intercultural communication researchers: (1) What are the underlying characteristics of intercultural understanding? and (2) What constitutes an interpretative perspective to intercultural…

Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

The survey questionnaire and a description of the coding system used for analyzing the data collected in a survey of Cherokee language and education are presented. The survey was designed to study language use, bilingualism, and education in the Cherokee community. The survey encompassed 198 Cherokee children between the ages of 5 and 14 who…