This study focused upon (1) whether the errors of sixth-grade children in spelling American English words were related to the dialect spoken by the children, and (2) what effect the teaching of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules based upon a single dialect pattern would have on the spelling of second-grade children. First, eight sixth-grade…

This course in Ga was designed for use by a teacher who is a professional linguist, perhaps with the assistance of a native speaker of Ga. In preparing the course, the authors had in mind that Ga has not yet been accorded the detailed description and analysis that some other Ghanian languages have received. This is especially true in matters of…

The practicing writer encounters four determinants of his use of prose. First, the language itself determines the expression: English, with its wealth of words and styles and with few traditional restrictions, provides problems of choice and temptations to overwrite. Second, the application of verse forms to the novel and a demand for consistently…

The ADD (Auditory Discrimination in Depth) Test measures the auditory perceptions basic to grasping the logic of the English writing and reading system. If the level of a subject's auditory perception--his ability to discriminate the phonemes of English and his ability to code phonemic sequences in both non-syllabic and syllabic units--can be…

The language patterns of low socioeconomic Negro, Spanish-surname, and Anglo children are sufficiently different from the middle class language patterns used in schools to put these children at a distinct educational disadvantage. By comparing the speech patterns of these children, this study sought to determine whether their language development…

As a step toward developing more controlled studies into children's language, this study attempted to develop standard stimuli to elicit eight basic sentence patterns from kindergarten children. Four stimuli were developed for each pattern. Each stimulus consisted of a stick-figure picture, a description of the picture, and a question or direction…

In the last 15 years much attention has been devoted to the identification and description of varieties (register and style) of language within the same speech community. The Research Section, Directorate of Studies, Staff Development Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada carried out three TESL-oriented linguistic studies on the…

Syntactical rule differences in black dialect that can be more helpful to young adolescents' perceptions than the corresponding rules in standard English were studied. The syntactical rule in black dialect that was identified as being more explicit than the corresponding rule in standard English was the invariant "be" verb form (as in…

Children's language abilities develop in a predetermined order, one stage necessarily preceding the next. The rate of this development remains relatively the same for physiologically normal human beings. Through research it is becoming possible to identify critical periods in linguistic development. Teachers could utilize and exploit these growth…

This book is a selected distillation of linguistic scholarship which describes from both a historical (diachronic) and a contemporary (synchronic) viewpoint that conglomerate set of dialects and idiolects called English. The emphasis is on contemporary American English. But foreign language examples are also given in an attempt to demonstrate the…

This study, the ninth in the series "Studies in the Phonology of Asian Languages," aims to analyze the phonological properties of the accentual system of Standard Colloquial Japanese on the basis of acoustic-phonetic data, especially data obtained through use of the sound spectrograph and pitch extractor. Chapters deal with functional distinctions…

This study tested the effect upon comprehension of repatterning passages from a tenth grade social studies text by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects expected to read the text. The thirty-four subjects were asked to write 1,000 words of prose dealing with social…

This paper deals with the computer's production and recognition of sentences in a connected discourse and its application to computer assisted instruction. Studies of textual properties in real discourses have been carried out at the paragraph level. The theoretical concepts of representing paragraph content in terms of (1) the factual data…

This is the first of two volumes dealing with a comprehensive review of structural patterns in the "Advanced Preparatory Course." All essential grammatical structures introduced in the "Basic Course" are included. The textual material in the 20 lessons is designed to stimulate recall and reinforce previously learned grammatical patterns. The…

This speech is based on a theory earlier proposed by the author that orthographic presentation of English is much like the abstract base of language which an individual uses in forming strategies for reading. Thus, his ability to read depends upon his facility with his language. An important implication for schools is that, given this theory, all…