Intended to discourage classroom reading teachers from relying on "phonics instruction" as a remedy for students' inadequate reading performance, this pamphlet presents reasons why phonics drills should not be taught at all in the classroom and offers a set of practical phonic awareness activities to help poor readers overcome reading…

The basic problem of communicating in Arabic today is the existence of two language varieties, one spoken and one written. These may even be considered two distinct languages. They have existed side by side for as long as one knows. Classical written Arabic became fossilized and developed as a closed system independent of common usage and…

Japan experienced a period of great social change in the middle of the nineteenth century, ending a long period of national isolation. This was the period of the Meiji Restoration. During the modernization and westernization that followed, the government made great advances in modernizing the Japanese language. This process had two phases: (1)…

A study was conducted to: (1) gather data which would permit researchers to describe the teaching behaviors and language characteristics of parents during literacy events with their children; (2) analyze these data for positive or negative influences of parents' oral language on their children's participation in the reading/writing activities; and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The nine titles deal with the following topics: (1) the effects of syntactic differences between oral and written discourse on the reading comprehension of second and fifth grade students; (2) the effects of a sentence combining…

Information transfer techniques in the teaching of reading and listening in foreign language and English as a second language classrooms are discussed. Students may be presented with a written or spoken text and provided incomplete visual stimuli to be completed with information drawn from the text. The idea is that the learners are helped in…

Viewing literacy as the ability to make use of all available possibilities of written language, the essays in this collection deal with a broad range of literacy related topics and issues. Titles of the 13 essays, written over a 10-year period, are as follows: (1) "The Politics of Ignorance"; (2) "Twelve Easy Ways to Make Learning to Read…

This is the first of two related documents reporting a study that analyzed the text of 26 student-teacher dialogue journals from a sixth grade class as a developmental link between students' natural competence in oral conversation and their developing competence in written language. The first section of the report discusses (1) the purpose of the…

Exploring writing in its many social and cultural variations, the seven articles in the first part of this book show different genres of writing serving various purposes in diverse contexts, while the six articles in the second part examine the effects of oral language differences on the learning and teaching of writing. Topics covered in the…

An approach to promote student editing of their own compositions, to be used in intermediate English as a second language classes, is discussed. Although editing or monitoring may not improve the communicative accuracy of a written message, it may give the message a more native-like quality. Monitoring works best on morphemes which are acquired…

OVER A 13-YEAR PERIOD, EXTENSIVE LONGITUDINAL DATA WERE COLLECTED ON EVERY ASPECT OF THE LINGUISTIC BEHAVIOR OF 338 OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, SCHOOL CHILDREN AS THEY PROGRESSED FROM KINDERGARTEN THROUGH GRADE 12. TAPED ORAL INTERVIEWS AND A WIDE RANGE OF TESTS AND INVENTORIES WERE CONDUCTED ANNUALLY TO MEASURE READING ACHIEVEMENT, LISTENING ABILITY,…

A PROGRAM WAS BEGUN IN AUGUST 1967 TO TEACH MANDARIN CHINESE IN TWO TUCSON, ARIZONA HIGH SCHOOLS. IT WAS FELT THAT SUCH CHINESE LANGUAGE CLASSES WOULD BECOME A COMPETITIVE ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL HIGH SCHOOL LANGUAGE OFFERINGS ONLY IF THESE PIONEERING CLASSES PROVED VERY SUCCESSFUL. IN ANALYZING THE BACKGROUND OF THE 42 STUDENTS ENROLLED IN THE…

Intended for teachers, educators, and specialists who are interested in the problems of learning disabilities, the text presents principles and practices necessary in the clinical teaching approach to children with learning disabilities. Areas considered include learning disabilities in general, the brain and learning, and special education and…

This paper argues that context is an important factor to be considered in linguistic analysis. Context is defined as the aggregate of linguistic, situational, social and cultural variables that surround linguistic units such as texts, discourses, utterances, words, morphemes, phonemes, sounds, and distinctive features. A "textual…

When Israeli four- to six-year-olds (N=120) wrote pairs of nouns sharing a syllable and sentences sharing either mainly nouns or mainly verbs, analysis indicated that the older the children, the more their invented writing reflected common linguistic elements and length of utterance. Nouns were represented in children's written productions earlier…