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)

There has been a shift of emphasis in research on the teaching of writing. The focus changed from the products of writing to writing processes. This has strong implications for instruction. Writing curriculum should be based on the organization of the cognitive processes involved in writing skills. (Author/VM)

Twenty college students, naive to Blissymbols, were asked to "guess" the meaning of 64 Blissymbols presented without their word gloss. The influence of symbol representativeness and the concreteness of associated word labels on the symbols'"guessability" was analyzed. The guessability of a symbol's gloss was significantly…

Describes a six-week program in which a teacher did not talk to her students but rather wrote all assignments and questions on the board. Concludes that the experiment improved student self-reliance and helped them to read and interpret instructions. (FL)

Describes a database for French spelling and grammar which has been working since 1984 in the city of Strasbourg. The database is accessed by the public through MINITEL terminals which are connected to common telephones. Provides examples of typical use and includes sample screen displays. (JDH)

The articles and papers included here all relate to the issue of Chinese characters and the continuing debate over whether it is difficult or easy to learn and to use them. (RM)

To make it easier for Chinese children to learn how to read, the Chinese writing system is being changed. The experimental approach of combining Chinese characters and pinyin is currently being carried out in Chinese primary schools. How this approach works in teaching children to read is described. (RM)

Argues that a culture's rhetoric constitutes an interface where the prescriptions of the language meet the practices of the culture. Attempts to identify and suggest some of the differences between Chinese and Western rhetoric that confront an American writing teacher in China. (EL)

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that first-grade beginning readers could evaluate the referential-communicative adequacy of simple, two-word messages better if they received oral-plus-written messages rather than oral-only messages. Results indicated that oral-plus-written messages were significantly easier for children to…

Finds no significant differences for immediate learning for students presented material orally and those presented the same material in written form. Shows, however, that students in the oral presentation mode performed significantly better than those in the reading mode on measures of delayed learning. (FL)

Presents an experiment which assessed the effectiveness of teaching written French to university students with computer assisted instruction (CAI). Results indicate that the CAI drill and practice lessons didn't effect any greater achievement improvement than ordinary instruction, but students had favorable attitudes toward CAI. (MBR)