This paper quotes liberally from writings on teacher supervision as it traces the history of attitudes toward the relationship between teachers and their supervisors from the middle 1800's to the present. The paper begins with the "Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools of the State of New York" (1845), which reveals the simpler…

Research on Spanish/English code switching is reviewed and the definitions and categories set up by the investigators are examined. Their methods of locating, limiting, and classifying true code switches, and the terms used and results obtained, are compared. It is found that in these studies, conversational (intra-discourse) code switching is…

A study of the uses of the French verb forms ending in "-ant" and the English forms ending in "-ing" begins with a discussion of the identification and classification of the various uses (substantive, adjectival, and adverbial) in each language and then compares them. The research finds that the English uses are far more varied…

An item discriminability study of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills Language Skills tests identified test items that are robust discriminators, psychometrically capable of separating low scorers from higher scorers in the language tests battery. The analysis was conducted by calculating a point-biserial correlation for each item on the four language…

Shirley Brice Heath's "Ways With Words," which deals with cultural differences and shows ways to negotiate a translation of culture, can be used to formulate a pedagogy which alerts students to cultural differences and encourages students to fit their own culturally inherited logical structures and personal styles into a rhetoric which…

A study of the difference between knowledge and use of two languages by bilinguals in a partially bilingual situation looks at what is known about language knowledge and language usage, the linguistic and communication tensions affecting monolinguals in a community, some special cases, and the possibilities for diachronic analysis of language…

Statistical analyses of the incidence of "what"-questions requiring variably complex responses are presented. The responses were asked of a bilingual child by different sets of caretakers in English and German over a one-year period starting at age 16 months. Results show that the caretakers' questions are geared first toward the child's…

The role and use of Spanish in the geographic areas outside of the U.S. Southwest are examined in a collection of 16 conference papers. The papers address the general topics of language contact, linguistic variation, sociolinguistic factors, and language maintenance policy, and planning. Among the specific issues discussed are: a dialectology of…

Naturally occurring interactions recorded during participant observation in two preschools were analyzed in order to develop a distinctively sociological theory of gender identity acquisition. Attention was focused on the use of sex-categorical terms and the "grammar" of sex categorization practices underlying this usage. The analysis…

A replication was conducted of Sterling Leonard's 1932 survey of "Current English Usage," which submitted a questionnaire of expressions to judges consisting of linguists, journalists, teachers, and businessmen. It was hypothesized that more of the expressions in Leonard's study would be acceptable today (looser standards) than was the…

The doctrine of "fighting words" was first articulated by the United States Supreme Court in 1942 in the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire when it declared one classificaton of language as outside the bounds of constitutional guarantees. Since then the Court has continually redrawn the line defining which speech is constitutionally…

Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the…

This paper examines the government's authority to regulate indecent broadcasts, beginning with a historical overview of the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) involvement with broadcast indecency and its application in case law. First Amendment considerations are discussed and some suggestions are made regarding how the Commission should…

This paper suggests that it may be productive for all teachers to become students of metaphor, as least of their own metaphors. Careful attention of how one describes the world appears to give clues as to how one constructs it. Such constructions can come under scrutiny only when one speaks or writes, and then attends to the language one has used.…

This paper examines the socio-cultural problems affecting new immigrants. The first part presents a person-centered ecological theoretical framework with two points of departure: the individual in his/her biological cognitive and socio-cultural sphere, and the person's communicative behavior. The data is drawn largely from a 1967-1979 project in…