Two groups of children in grades 3 and 4 (80 lower-socioeconomic Negro children whose native speech dialect was Negro nonstandard English and 80 middle-class white children whose native dialect was standard English) were given two 50-item cloze reading comprehension tests to determine the effect of native speech dialect and written language…

This guide for a course in communication includes five chapters. The first chapter discusses the need for oral communication as part of the freshman English program. The second chapter includes an annotated bibliography of articles and books related to communication and communication courses, a summary of the four basic communication skills…

How linguistic principles can be incorporated into reading instruction was shown by examining the interrelationships of certain linguistics ideas to learning to read. First, the acquisition of oral language was discussed as to the developmental stages: phonological, morphological-lexical, and syntactic. It was suggested that reading instruction…

Since a reading knowledge of Japanese is an indispensable research tool for advanced work in Chinese studies, the student of Chinese is faced with the task of "developing a facility in two of the most difficult written languages of the world." With the goal of making this task as easy as possible, a course has been developed at Cornell University…

This study proposed to analyze the teaching of grammar nationally in grades three through eight by a qualitative analysis of textbooks used and a questionnaire survey of actual teaching practices, policies, and procedures. The textbooks were analyzed for their approaches to sentences, parts of speech, and word usage; their page allotments to…

Volume Two contains Units XXI through XXX of the Baluchi course. Unit XXI introduces the Arabic script as adapted for Baluchi. Special conventions, abbreviations, numerals, and punctuation symbols are discussed next, and several sections are devoted to the orthography of certain substantive and verbal affies. A series of reading drills which…

Results of a study involving an experimental and a control group of first-semester, college students in a required language course concern the use of the French dictee in the classroom as a testing and teaching technique. Performance on written and oral examinations indicates that dictation practice stimulates awareness of the written language,…

The standard of mechanical literacy of any publication should be very high, both for one's own information and for education in and outside classrooms. On this count, too many smalltime local papers are good only for "negative teaching" of socially accepted language. The influence of any newspaper on the language depends upon how much of it is…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of exposure to and study of good literature on a child's ability to create written stories. Eighteen classes of fourth and sixth graders were divided into two experimental groups and one control group. One experimental group listened to selected books read aloud and participated in teacher led…

This instructional bulletin, second in a series of three publications designed to provide a sequential development of communication skills for educable mentally retarded pupils in elementary school, contains suggested learning objective and activities for implementation in language arts courses. Contents include: "Developing Fundamental Skills in…

This document, one of a series on questions regarding humanistic education, contains a transcribed conversation about language between Walter J. Ong, Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at Saint Louis University, and Wayne Altree of Newton South High School, Newton Center, Massachusetts. This conversation on language…

The properties of written, textual language with which children deal in school can be distinguished from those of oral language by examining the manner in which interpersonal and logical functions are stressed and by assessing the degree to which interpretation is confined by meaning explicitly stated in textual matter. The developmental process…

Writing samples representing argumentation, exposition, narration, and description were gathered from 51 fifth-grade pupils. Significant differences were found among the four modes of writing and among high-, medium-, and low-ability groups for T-unit length, clauses per T-unit, and clause length. Argumentation produced the most complex writing,…

The sex of college freshmen theme writers was identified by analyzing subject matter clues. A sample of 60 descriptive themes was selected for study; half were written by females and half by males. A panel of five female and five male English teachers read the themes and indicated the sex they thought the writers to be as well as the reasons for…

Reports on an examination of 50 French school grammars from the last 30 years, to ascertain how thoroughly they clarified the difference between "written code" and "spoken code." Substantive plural marking was investigated. It was found that most texts treated the topic inadequately. (IFS/WGA)