This study assessed the effect of six weeks of sentence-combining activities on the syntactic maturity of first-year university students. The Syntactic Maturity Test (SMT) and a free writing exercise were used as pre/post instruments to determine words-per-T-unit and words-per-clause ratios. Significant results favoring the experimental group were…

Frequently, government writing is filled with complex and obscure jargon, or "gobbledygook." This book was written for Bureau of Land Management (BLM) employees, in order to call their attention to the need for simple, concise writing. The first two chapters provide a formula for judging the difficulty of a piece of writing and show how writers…

Errors made by first and second year university students are grouped into categories and means for dealing with these errors are suggested. The article is divided into six parts. The introduction includes information about: (1) the linguistic background of the students and the university staff, (2) the educational system, (3) some language…

Writing is a highly complex process requiring skills that are not possessed by all students. In some cases, students may have been taught writing skills before they were developmentally ready for them, thus diminishing their future ability to learn those skills. Some students may have specific learning disabilities, sometimes affecting only the…

This dictionary contains lists of nouns in the Deg Xinag or Ingalik language as spoken in the Yukon River villages of Anvik, Shageluk, and Holy Cross, and the Kuskokwim River village of Stony River. After a presentation of the Ingalik alphabet, the nouns, with English equivalents, are listed according to the following categories: mammals; fish;…

Portions of a corpus of modern American prose were analyzed for the occurrence of "man" and its compounds. The passages analyzed were written in 1961, and showed no effects of recent movements to "desex" language. Occurrences were classified as generic mixed, generic masculine, and specified masculine. The mean of instances per…

Modern linguistic theory offers two main contributions to the improvement of writing: readability and appropriateness. Readability can be developed by improving the correctness of forms used and achieved by carrying out an error analysis on the student's writing to provide insights into errors and clause structure. Linguists have determined that…

A frequency count was conducted of linguistic features in the English of the Philippine mass media. Philippine English was found to have a smaller inventory of phonological units than Received Standard English. Vowel reduction does not seem to be prevalent. The collapsing of phonological distinctions is most evident in vowels and fricatives.…

This 15-unit guide to the use of a Mandarin Chinese dictionary explains the order of the Chinese characters in the dictionary and presents practice drills in using the dictionary. Chinese characters are usually arranged in the dictionary by their radicals. Sixty of the most common radicals are introduced in the first ten lessons. Lesson 11 is a…

THIS COMPANION BOOK TO "FORMAL ARABIC, PART 1" CONTAINS THE GRAMMATICAL NOTES AND AN INDIVIDUAL VOCABULARY LISTING FOR EACH OF THE 26 SELECTIONS INCLUDED IN "PART 1." ALL WORDS ARE GLOSSED EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST 500 WORDS OF LANDAU'S "A WORD COUNT OF MODERN ARABIC PROSE," AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES, NEW YORK,…

AN INSTRUMENT FOR MEASURING LANGUAGE MATURITY SHOULD BE EASILY ADMINISTRABLE AND SCOREABLE AND SHOULD BE BASED ON VALID INDICES OF LANGUAGE MATURITY. A RECENT STUDY BY KELLOG W. HUNT SUGGESTED THAT THESE INDICES BE BASED ON A NEW SYNTACTIC UNIT, THE T-UNIT, CONSISTING OF 1 MAIN CLAUSE TOGETHER WITH ANY CLAUSES SUBORDINATED TO IT. COORDINATED MAIN…

"FORMAL ARABIC, PART 1" PRESENTS 26 READING SELECTIONS WRITTEN IN THE LITERARY STYLE OF DOCUMENTS AND FORMAL ADDRESS. EXCEPT FOR FOUR SELECTIONS WHICH ARE EXCERPTS, ALL ARE REPRODUCED IN THEIR ENTIRETY AND IN UNEDITED FORM, CLASSIFIED INTO THE FOLLOWING SECTIONS--(1) SPEECHES, (2) DIPLOMATIC NOTES, (3) CONSTITUTIONS, (4) TREATIES, (5)…

A SEQUENTIAL, INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGY WAS PRESENTED FOR DECODING LETTERS INTO SOUND. THE STRATEGY WAS INTENDED TO COMPLEMENT INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAMS IN BEGINNING READING. LETTER-SOUND CORRESPONDENCES AND CONCEPTS WERE PROVIDED FOR ALL LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET AS THEY MIGHT OCCUR IN VARYING POSITIONS TO FORM ENGLISH WORDS. OF THE VOWELS, ONLY TWO…