This publication offers a collection of short essays on racism that originally appeared in the newsletter of an organization formed to promote racial justice called Community Change, Inc. The essays are each limited to one to three pages and are grouped by subject area. The opening section, on identifying racism, includes essays on pluralism,…

This volume contains working papers on a variety of topics in linguistics. They include: "A View of Phonology from a Cognitive and Functional Perspective" (Joan Bybee); "The Geography of Language Shift: Distance from the Mexican Border and Spanish Language Claiming in the Southwestern United States" (Garland D. Bills, Eduardo…

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. e-Learning is efficient task relevant and just-in-time learning grown from the learning requirements of the new dynamically changing, distributed business world. In this paper we design an e-Learning system…

The construct validity of four self-concept (SC) traits (general SC, academic SC, English SC, mathematics SC), as measured by three different scales (Likert, semantic differential, Guttman) for low- (n=252) and high-track (n=588) Canadian high school students, was assessed using both the Campbell-Fiske criteria, and a comparison of hierarchically…

This paper examines the changing nature of societal perspectives and the social contexts of educational partnerships or collaborations through a semantic analysis of the literature on educational cooperation and related educational themes and practices. In addition, a continuum of leitmotives on educational partnerships drawn from historic and…

An interlingual communication support system that shows semantic matches and mismatches among languages being used for any transaction is discussed. The system uses a thesaurus approach to the meaning structure of language, which is hierarchical, but uses a cross-hierarchical approach to access different meanings for selection of the appropriate…

A study examined the identification of distinct subgroups of learning-disabled young adults based on their ability to generate written language. Two subgroups of learning-disabled college students, the language strong/visually weak (N=22) and the visually strong/language weak (N=10), were identified based on evaluation of 32 essays. Subjects were…

A study investigated the apparent inconsistency of meaning connected with the term "professor," using the problematic aspect of the term as a way of examining tacit features of a particular speech community. The "social drama" that served as a catalyst for the study centers around the presence of the national "Accuracy in…

Advanced learners of second languages and natural language processing systems both demand much more detailed lexical information than conventional dictionaries provide. Text composition, whether by humans or machines, requires a thorough understanding of relationships between words, such as selectional restrictions, case patterns, factives, and…

A two-year ethnographic study of kindergarteners' experiences in a French immersion classroom focused on the processes by which children find and construct meaning through classroom interaction and communication processes. Data were gathered through classroom observation and videotapes. The initially unilingual English-speaking students were…

The methodology reported in this paper argues for a synthesis of various theories and methods. First, a synopsis is given of the pedagogical and linguistic approaches that should underlie a successful attempt to teach the contrast in two verb tenses in Portuguese. Secondly, a contrast unique to Portuguese is examined and a multistage approach for…

This collection of symposium papers on varieties of the English language used in Ireland includes: "The Role of Irish English in the Formation of Colonial Englishes," by P. Trudgill; "Anglo-Irish Verse in Translation from Irish," by P. L. Henry; "The Methodology of Urban Language Studies," by J. Milroy;…

The focus of the study reported here was to investigate people's comprehension ability as a function of the number and type of negations embedded within sentences similar to those which might appear as premises in syllogisms. The subjects were one group of 11 Hispanic and four groups of Anglo students, with 15 in each Anglo group. Thirty-two…

For the past 150 years public schools in the United States have, in one form or another, tried to address the presence of children in classrooms whose cognitive, behavioral or physical characteristics have been deemed sufficiently problematic to merit a "special" education. Current federal law identifies thirteen categories of…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether good and poor readers of the same age levels differed in their performance on a task which required the integration of semantic-syntactic and grapho-phonic information. Fifteen fourth grade good readers, 15 fourth grade poor readers, and 15 second grade good readers read six sentences that had one…