Recent research supports the theory that unskilled writers produce writing through the mediation of spoken language. That is, their writing contains inexplicit meanings, or semantic abbreviations, characteristic of conversations in which the listener is familiar with the situational and cultural contexts of the monologue. Two studies further…

This guide provides an evaluation system by which a teacher or parent can follow a child's progress in sentence structure, usage, punctuation, capitalization, penmanship, and composition from kindergarten through grade eight. Each page lists an objective that is coded so that it is possible to correlate related materials, such as test items,…

Examples of cross cultural misunderstandings are examined in this paper to show how cultural (contextual) meaning must be regarded as an integral feature of the overall semantic meaning of an utterance. The examples, taken from the Filipino dialect Tagalog, illustrate how ignorance of the cultural assumptions and attitudes associated with an…

A study was conducted to analyze the language behavior of mothers of children with normal language development and mothers of children with delayed language development as they interacted with their children to determine if the two groups of mothers provided different linguistic inputs for their children. Two randomly selected groups of children…

This text contains 62 lessons in Hausa for the student of Hausa as a second Language. The principal emphasis of the lessons is in developing skills in the spoken language, and study is preferable with a native speaker of Hausa. The use of English is to be avoided except when absolutely necessary. Because of the attention given to oral skills, the…

This report is intended as a preliminary survey of the problems in the collection and sociological analysis of student slang. Dealing with the notion that every speaker handles a variety of registers and tends to choose among them in accordance with the particular social situation in which he finds himself, this study isolates some of the…

The Soviet Union (USSR) is an immense multinational and multilingual country. At the time of the Revolution (1917) there were 150 national languages spoken in the USSR and 180 recognized linguistic groups, however, 70% of the total population of the USSR was illiterate and the literacy rate of the Middle Asia varied from 1% to 5%. After 1917, mass…

This study examines the use of personal pronouns by 6-year-old children. It was hypothesized that the child's use of personal pronouns would reflect an emphasis and awareness of the social self as actor and that the self as subject would be less salient. Subjects were 128 first or only children and their mothers. Five-minute conversations between…

This study examined the patterns of ongoing play manifested over a year's time by 141 three- and four-year-old boys and girls at nursery schools and daycare centers. The relationships between such play and concurrent language usage and the child's patterns of television viewing at home were examined during this period. Parents of the children were…

The bulletin reports on a survey studying birthplace and language characteristics of persons of selected Asian origins living in the United States in spring 1976. Using data from the Survey of Income and Education (SIE) conducted by the Bureau of the Census and the National Center, the document studies Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Pilipino, and…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. This pamphlet is concerned with various aspects of the Bullock Committee Report. The first section maps the various ways in which teachers…

Three questionnaires are offered as language planning aids. These instruments measure variables in language background, language behavior, and language policy, particularly in situations where two or more dialects of languages are used. The first questionnaire asks 60 questions designed to form a language background profile of an individual. The…

This pamphlet is the fifth in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. The pamphlet reports on a case study involving a twelfth grade…

THE UZBEKS BELONG TO THOSE TURKIC-SPEAKING PEOPLES WHO HAVE A RICH LITERARY TRADITION. THE STUDY OF THE OLD UZBEK LITERARY LANGUAGE (SOMETIMES REFERRED TO INCORRECTLY AS "CHAGATAY") IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE FOR DETERMINING THE PERIOD OF HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE UZBEK LITERARY LANGUAGE. IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT FOR ESTABLISHING ITS…

DURING THE PAST FEW YEARS INTEREST IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS, THE SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE RELATION OF LINGUISTIC FORMS AND SOCIAL MEANING, HAS GREATLY ACCELERATED. IN CONTRAST TO THE FIELD OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, MANY OF THE MAIN FIGURES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS ARE LINGUISTS WHO HAVE FOUND THAT SOCIAL FEATURES ARE CONTINUALLY CENTRAL TO…