Recent changes in French grammatical and spelling conventions not generally known in North America are outlined, including instances of gender and number agreement, plurals of hyphenated words, articles, numerical adjectives, indefinites, verb forms, and accent marks. (MSE)

Discusses three principles germane to the idea that writing is a response to its function, compares school writing with home writing, and suggests specific functions of writing that are frequently used in classrooms. (DF)

Describes a study of writing samples of three-, four-, and five-year-olds enrolled in the University of Virginia's child development center. In addition, the children were asked to draw pictures, write about them, read what they had written, and respond to questions gauging their knowledge of written language. (CT)

Using Hindi and Urdu as examples, illustrates the shortcomings in the definition of South Asian languages that has been attempted in Britain so far. Argues that description and definition of a language have to include aspects of culture, religion, script, politics, and the speakers' own perception of their language and language choice. (SED)

Using Susanne Langer's concepts of presentational and discursive symbolism, constructs a theory of text production that describes presentation and discourse and relations between them as major components in the evolution of text from thought to written language. Concludes by examining the implications of this theory for understanding students'…

Concludes that there are about 88,500 words in printed school English and that even systematic direct vocabulary instruction could not account for a significant proportion of all the words children actually learn, nor cover more than a modest proportion of the words they will encounter in school reading materials. (FL)

Reviews the psycholinguistic view of the relationship between reading and written and spoken language and presents teaching strategies for beginning readers based on this view. (FL)

Notes that considerations of audience awareness are receiving increased attention in composition theory and teaching. Argues that while audience awareness is often conceived as a unitary, global construct, it in fact has distinctly identifiable dimensions. Discusses the dimensions of social cognition along with their interaction with the composing…

Finds that words written in dialect are difficult for black students to comprehend while reading silently, which does not agree with previously advanced hypotheses by other researchers. (RB)

A historical review since the late 1800s suggests that criticism of student writing ability has been a perennial problem and that similar reasons for it have been cited for nearly a century. (LBH)

Timothy E. McCracken and W. Allen Ashby, English composition professors at Union College, are interviewed as to their methods, attitudes, and philosophies of teaching. They suggest that a student needs a sense of himself as a prerequisite for writing. (LBH)

This article discusses punctuation in Spanish, specifically rules for the use of the comma, the colon, and the semi-colon. The rules for the placement of prosodic and orthographic stress are also discussed. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

This article discusses the various styles of commercial correspondence in Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Some of the problems encountered by elementary grade second language pupils when they do uncontextualized written exercises in numbered lists from a course book are discussed. Ways to partially overcome such problems are suggested. (RM)

This study aims to investigate Instant Messaging from the new rhetorical genre perspective. Considering IM as a primary genre (Bakhtin, 1986) I intend to examine its social motive and social and textual features. Also, using Vygotsky's (1978, 1986) concept of situated learning, I will explain how IM users learn the genre to communicate through it.…