Because the conceptual and grammatical constructions of English and Chinese vary drastically, Chinese students often have difficulty learning to think and write in English. Cultural conflicts of young Chinese in America compound their difficulties with the English language. The old values expressed by Chinese affect students' abilities to write…

To analyze the process involved in maintaining conversational coherency, the study described in this paper used a construct called a "context space" that grouped utterances referring to a single issue or episode. The paper defines the types of context spaces, parses individual conversations to identify the underlying model or structure,…

The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…

Intended for students in regular and advanced composition classes, each of the four controlled composition exercises presented in this paper aims at teaching writing style through carefully constructed short passages that concentrate on an isolated problem in style such as parallel structure, relative clauses, pseudo-relative clauses, and…

This study examined the effect(s) of rhyme on the recognition and recall of story events by 32 nursery school children at the University of Maine Child Study Center. Although subjects reported liking stories better when they were presented as nursery rhymes rather than prose passages, recognition of story events was significantly higher for prose…

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…

Intended as an introduction to psycholinguistics from the linguist's point of view, this book addresses itself to three main topics: the innateness of language, the relationship of linguistic knowledge to language usage, and the comprehension and production of speech. In 12 chapters, the book discusses the nature of language development, the…

Sacks's description-by-categorization theory was tested in a study to determine how contextual information influences the interpretation of verbal messages. The technique of enjambed conversation (a transcription of a conversation void of punctuation and speaker designation) was used to produce two verbal messages, one "more related" the…

This computer program, a mechanization of the handsorted techniques which geographical dialectology has been using, increases the number of hypotheses that can be explored and the various correlations that can be made. It can draw several of the kinds of maps that dialectologists have used in direct atlases. The hardware, software, and program…

Coherence and cohesion are fundamental considerations of the composing process that help to define the global and local components of texuality. Global text coherence centers on those aspects of the familiar rhetorical situation. Coherence operates at the paragraph and essay levels, answering questions about focus, tone, mode, topic, and thesis.…

THESE FOUR TESTS--"THAT-NOUN CLAUSES (ABSTRACT NOUNS, ABSTRACT ADJECTIVES, AND TRANSITIVE ANIMATE VERBS),""REVIEW OF EMBEDDING AND CONJUNCTIVE TRANSFORMATIONS,""COMPLEMENT VERBS," AND "IMPERATIVE"--WERE DESIGNED BY THE OREGON CURRICULUM STUDY CENTER FOR A 10TH-GRADE LANGUAGE CURRICULUM. THEY ARE INTENDED TO…

TWO SIGNIFICANT ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING, THE VERTICAL ORGANIZATION OF THE PARADIGM AND THE STUDENT'S ANALYTICAL ABILITY, HAVE BEEN OVERLOOKED IN FAVOR OF DEVELOPING CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS BY A HORIZONTAL APPROACH IN WHICH, FOR EXAMPLE, THE MATERIAL PRESENTS THE ACCUSATIVE CASE ONE DAY AND THE FIRST PERSON PRESENT OF ALL VERBS ON ANOTHER.…

FRANCISCO ARCELLANA'S "THE MATS," LIKE ANY WELL-CONSTRUCTED SHORT STORY, CAN SERVE AS AN IMPORTANT TEACHING DEVICE IN GUIDING STUDENTS, ESPECIALLY THOSE LEARNING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE, TO READ WITH UNDERSTANDING AND APPRECIATION, THE TECHNIQUES OF CONVERTING VERBALS BACK INTO VERBS, REPLACING ALL PRONOUNS WITH THEIR ANTECEDENTS IN PARALLEL…

THE RESEARCH REPORTED HERE CONCERNED THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND COGNITION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WHORF HYPOTHESIS ABOUT LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. EXPERIMENTS WERE CARRIED OUT INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF SOME LINGUISTIC AND REFERENT DIMENSION VARIABLES ON THE LEARNING OF MINIATURE LINGUISTIC SYSTEMS. A MINIATURE LINGUISTIC SYSTEM (MLS) IS A…

AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE GRAMMATICAL SYSTEM OF A FOREIGN LANGUAGE GIVES THE BEGINNING STUDENT A FOUNDATION UPON WHICH THE BASIC SKILLS CAN BE DEVELOPED. THUS, THE TEACHER'S PRESENTATION OF THE TARGET LANGUAGE SHOULD ADHERE TO THE BASICALLY LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING, IN ORDER, THE BASIC FORMS, GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES, STRUCTURES WHICH HAVE NO…