This article presents strategies, including communicative reading strategies, to facilitate holistic language learning in young children with language and learning disorders. Strategies include pairing oral and written language and using preparatory sets, semantic maps, flowcharts, and theme building. An example of narrative discourse demonstrates…

Discusses intercultural problems of writing academic English in a non-English context, specifically in Finland. It is argued that before such courses are designed for academic nonnative writers and for teachers of such writers, it is essential to conduct textlinguistic research into cultural and linguistic differences in the practices existing…

A multidimensional approach analyzes the linguistic characteristics of 26 Somali spoken and written registers. Somali represents a different language type, and no single dimension adequately describes the relations among registers. Findings are related to previous analyses of English, Tuvaluan, and Korean. (27 references) (Author/LB)

Most early childhood teachers support breaking away from the letter-a-week method of teaching the alphabet but question how to achieve that goal. Concepts related to how young children learn the alphabetic principle are reviewed and successful strategies for teaching the principle are presented. (LB)

Individual bilingual language performance in occasional songs is examined with focus on the use of Danish and English by a female member of a Danish-American organization in both song-writing and organizational written recordkeeping. The findings confirm the hypothesis of a conditioning effect of features of genre and social role on the…

Comments on the use of mother-tongues in written communication and basic education, using literacy programs in multilinguistic contexts as an example of the plurality of literacies. Democracy and citizenship, and the social demand for communication competence in postindustrial societies, are discussed with respect to the continuity dimension of…

An analysis of letters written by 19th-century African Americans shows constraints on verbal "-s" marking that parallel those found in the writing of Scotch-Irish immigrants in the same time period and region, specifically a subject type constraint and a proximity to subject constraint. (MDM)

The conceptual activities required in an organizational behavior course are analyzed to study how they determined the nature of discourse. It is argued that these activities can be transferred from the English for Academic Purposes classroom to university content courses and can help nonnative speakers adapt to those areas. (36 references)…

This study assessed reading difficulties and cognitive impairments of German-speaking dyslexic children at grade levels two, three, and four. It was found that German dyslexic children suffered from a pervasive speed deficit for all types of reading tasks, including text, high frequency words, and psuedowords but, at the same time, showed…

Examines research on comparative differences in reading disabilities to determine whether findings corroborate the belief that learning to read in Japanese produces fewer reading disabilities resulting from its writing system. Suggests that there is no perfect orthography and that a small percentage of children will have difficulty in learning to…

Discusses the social interaction between writers using electronic mail systems. Shares two stories concerning this written form of conversation. (MG)

Fourteen young adults performed better than 14 adults ages 60-69 on speechreading and wrote more words in response to a speechreading task. No correlations were found between speechreading performance and eyeblinks in either group. There was a significant correlation between number of written words and percent-correct speechreading scores in the…

Investigation of the use of a multiple-trait scoring procedure to obtain communicative writing profiles of adult nonnative English speakers found that the scoring method was highly reliable in composite assessment, but provided little psychometric support for assessing certain individual writing components. (28 references) (Author/CB)

The place of literature in the foreign language classroom is described, and the effectiveness of the short story is noted. Suggestions are offered regarding selection criteria, classroom activities, oral activities, role play, oral comprehension, and a variety of written exercises including sequencing and writing dialog. (Contains seven…

Investigated the online processing strategies used by a sample of nonnative speakers of English who were asked to give the meanings of selected common idioms presented in a written context. Data were gathered using a think-aloud procedure; participants were asked to verbalize their thoughts as they arrived at the meaning of the idioms. (Author/VWL)