This study presents a formal device which can be used to display interlanguage variability while revealing its overall systematicity. Two types of variability are recognized: (1) production of a number of variant structures for a single target language structure at one point in time; and (2) variation over time that is attributable to the…

The study of the varieties of language usage in social contexts can made a significant contribution to general welfare if judgments of people's language are unshackled from right-wrong presuppositions and a dispassionate approach is taken to relating their language to the situations they must deal with in the course of their lives. An…

Fifty-six bidialectical rural Hawaiian children participated in a study to determine whether they possessed comparable communicative competence in both dialects (Hawaiian-Creole English and standard English). The subjects, selected from kindergarten, first, third, and sixth grades, worked in groups of two to complete a communication task. Half of…

The hypothesis that professional writers would be judged superior to college students on both holistic and analytic evaluations was only partially confirmed when four teacher-evaluators rated the anonymously submitted compositions of 64 college students and 5 professional writers. On the holistic scale the professionals did not distinguish…

Forty undergraduate students were subjects in a study to discover students' attitudes toward language and grammar and to determine how the demand for grammatical correctness affected them in preparing and delivering public speeches. The subjects each completed an 11-item interview schedule that elicited demographic information as well as feelings…

This dictionary of Kodiak Alutiiq contains much of the conversational vocabulary of the Kodiak Island dialects. The alphabet is presented with examples in English as a key to pronunciation and with explanations of the sound system. An introduction to the dictionary explains the format and provides examples for each category of word to facilitate…

The effect of Finnish language experiences on the way native speakers of English evaluate errors made by Finns in producing English was examined. The study was designed to show the role of the criterion of acceptability in the evaluation process and to establish some of the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors that may affect the…

A content analysis was conducted to assess the verbal climate of Saturday morning television programs, the types of verbal aggression that appear in them, and the way verbal responses relate to other program variables. Three content analysis tools were developed and applied to ten half-hour program blocks drawn randomly from the regularly…

Empirical studies that demonstrate probable gender biased perceptions resulting from the use of man-linked words and third-person, singular masculine pronouns are reviewed in this paper. Among the findings revealed by the review are: (1) there is a tendency for people to perceive man-linked words as more likely to refer to men than to women; (2)…

A study of data on Japanese children shows that the development of verbs occurs at the same time as the development of nouns and may even precede it. The subjects for the study were two children who were learning Japanese as their first language. Four speech samples, taken between the ages of 22 and 28 months, were audiotaped and supplemented by…

THIS TEXT IS DESIGNED TO INTRODUCE THE BASIC VOCABULARY OF NAVAHO (NAVAJO) IN CONVERSATIONAL FORM. EACH OF THE 64 SHORT LESSON UNITS CONTAINS A PAGE OF QUESTION-AND-RESPONSE PATTERNS IN NAVAHO (TRANSLATED IN ENGLISH ON THE NEXT PAGE), FOLLOWED BY DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMATICAL EXPLANATIONS AND OCCASIONAL COMMENTS ON NAVAHO USAGE AND CULTURE. A…

This course in language curriculum development has five units: (1) Language situations and policies in Africa; (2) Preparing objectives for language curriculum development; (3) Selecting and preparing materials for language curriculum development; (4) Implementing language curriculum programmes; and (5) Evaluation and renewing language curriculum…

This discussion addresses the need for teaching vocabulary in the framework of second language instruction, aiming at communicative competence and using authentic documents as instructional material. The analysis is based on "Le Niveau-Seuil" (Threshold Level), and discusses the following elements of a functional methodology: (1) the fact that…

This paper focuses on the roles and functions that English based vernaculars play in contemporary society and reviews literature pertinent to that topic. Areas considered include (1) societal behavior toward language, (2) language as a group marker, and (3) the contextual parameters of language use. In the discussion of societal behavior toward…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) stop/fricative variation; (2) the acquisition of relational comparatives; (3) teachers' turn taking sanctions in primary school lessons; (4) hearing as an age…