Any theory of language acquisition must take into account the actual speech heard by children during the acquisition period. When 8 well-educated mothers were tape-recorded talking to their daughters, ages 16 to 30 months, it was found that their speech differed significantly from that spoken to another adult. The mothers used a more restricted…

This study of written language development and instruction of elementary school children found that realistic approaches are needed in teaching language usage, dialects, and registers. These approaches should include a nonrepetitive instructional system accounting for different linguistic abilities, a diagnostic evaluation of children's written…

Roger Shuy and Ralph Fasold's introduction describing sociolinguistics as (1) a desire to refine linguistic theory, (2) an attempt to describe the sociocultural matrices of language, and (3) an effort to apply sociolinguistic knowledge to this monograph. Walt Wolfram contributes substantially to the development of sociolinguistics theory in…

The author reports on an investigation of the variations in total verbal output and in verbal variety noted from interview responses of eighteen persons, each involved with a specific issue or topic at one of three levels. He defines the levels as: (1) observer, or someone who is aware of the issue but passive about it; (2) participant, or one who…

A representative sampling of the career of one man concerned with learners, teachers and with English is presented. In "So What Good is English," is demonstrated how both language and literature play vital roles in the designs of man and in man's designs; the importance of communication is demonstrated for even the most menial tasks in life; the…

The book represents oral communication as a wide spectrum of speech events ranging from daily perfunctory comments to highly structured, formal speeches. The introductory chapter summarizes various approaches to the study of the communication process. The subsequent chapters present: (1) elements of communication language structure, language…

This article investigates a specific foreign language (FL) learning problem, the substitution of /s,z/ for English unvoiced and voiced "th" by native speakers of Egyptian Arabic, and concludes that the facts are better explained in terms of language transfer than by an explanation in terms of inherent difficulty independent of native…

This paper discusses the results of part of an ongoing project studying an aspect of real world language usage, the comprehension of standard jury instructions. Problems in the comprehension of these instructions include the memory load that they impose, the fact that most instructions are read only once, and the fact that instructions are written…

Ten contributors provide extensive bibliographic essays on topics of importance in the teaching of college composition. Works cited and commented upon range from those of Aristotle to the contributions of contemporary scholars. Separate essays deal with invention, structure and form in nonfiction prose, approaches to the study of style, modes of…

The purposes of this handbook are to assist teachers in examining a number of concerns regarding the expression of sexism in language and literature and to provide some suggestions for coping with these problems in the classroom. The first section, devoted to language, considers stereotyping and role expectations, as well as the following areas of…

Concerned with college students' written composition and their understanding of English grammar, usage, and mechanics, this book is based on the beliefs that society is clearly class structured, that representatives of all classes attend various kinds of colleges, that society is responsible for each of these students, and that this obligation…

This paper reviews three studies designed to assess the impact of gender-related terms. The first study examined 144 male and female undergraduate students' preferences for and performance on tasks using alternatives to the standard English forms, "his/hers" and "him/her." The second study attempted to replicate the original study and to prove…

The discoveries of theoretical linguistics could aid teachers in explaining such usages as "well,""sort of," sex link uses, and forms marking levels of politeness. Conversely, there is much about second language learning that theoretical linguistics could learn from applied linguistics. (Author/KM)

This is a slightly abbreviated version of part of a report commissioned at the end of 1995 by the Queensland Department of Education, Peninsula Region, and carried out with the help of teachers at Thursday Island State High School. It analyses some formal language differences between written Standard Australian English and spoken Torres Strait…

This article examines "ty" and "vy" usage in contemporary Soviet Russian by way of contrastive analysis with pronoun usage in English. The importance of understanding the cultural implications of the Russian pronouns is stressed. (CLK)