Verbs (4800) from 1200 compositions written by Nebraska students (grades 3-6) were examined using the most sophisticated grammatical analysis available to determine children's use of the English verb system and to compare their use to recent studies of the verb in adult writing. Information obtained included the following items: Children used…

In the last decade an unprecedented number of college-level foreign students have appeared in the United States, competing with native speakers in schools where the only medium of instruction is English. All students at American universities have to do three kinds of sophisticated writing--summarizing in notes, writing exam essays, and writing…

The inventory presented here was produced by listing 13 sentence elements (subject, object, etc.) with specifications as to mutual exclusiveness and then presenting them to a computer with a request for permutations. Those items for which no examples could be found were excluded from the output, and the remaining patterns constitute the inventory…

The purpose of this study was to develop a foundation for reliable and effective measurement of significant parameters in the development of written language skills in school age children. The subjects for the study were 25 nine-year-old children, 12 boys and 13 girls, who were randomly selected from among 1,559 participants. The findings…

To evaluate the quality of written compositions, researchers at Educational Testing Service developed the Composition Evaluation Scales (CES), after factor-analytic studies of the reasons teachers gave for their judgments of compositions. This is a set of eight scales: ideas, organization, wording, flavor, usage, punctuation, spelling, and…

In an effort to resolve some of the problems of widespread reading failure, this report investigated the way in which the language of inner-city black first graders corresponded to the language of beginning reading texts and whether or not dialect features occurred consistently in the children's speech. Twenty first grade black children were…

This study of written language development and instruction of elementary school children found that realistic approaches are needed in teaching language usage, dialects, and registers. These approaches should include a nonrepetitive instructional system accounting for different linguistic abilities, a diagnostic evaluation of children's written…

THE NECESSITY OF KEEPING AN EXPERIMENTAL, OPEN-MINDED OUTLOOK TOWARD FURTHER IMPROVEMENT IN THE INITIAL TEACHING ALPHABET (ITA) IS STRESSED. A LIMITED AMOUNT OF RESEARCH HAS LED TO THE CONCLUSION THAT THE TRADITIONAL ORTHOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH IS AN IMPORTANT CAUSE OF DIFFICULTY IN TEACHING AS WELL AS IN LEARNING READING AND WRITING IN…

Nothing is of more practical use to a writing teacher than a unified theory of writing. (JH)

A staff tutor in mathematics in Britain's Open University illustrates three types of communication breakdown due to language factors that occur between the team developing mathematics correspondence courses and their students. He concludes that the traditional teaching language of university mathematics is not entirely suitable in the Open…

Investigated the relationship between syntactical complexity of high school students' written language and their ability to reason formally. Format reasoning ability of 50 high school students was measured by a 15-item group-administered demonstration test developed by Lawson. (HM)

The impact of language (especially written language) on the acquisition of knowledge and skills in children is discussed. (MJB)

A study of errors in papers written by upper-level (Grades 11-13) students of English, notably in the use of participles, inversion, modal auxiliary verbs, pointed to deficiencies in upper-level teaching texts, insufficient exposure, and goals that are too high. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Evaluation of the Russian oral and written proficiency of third-year university students (N=9) suggested a clear relationship between the students' initial oral proficiency ratings and the grammatical accuracy of their written compositions; the lower a student's oral proficiency rating, the greater the average number of written mistakes, and vice…

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)