In order to improve their students' skills in self-expression, teachers should emphasize the importance of tone, an awareness of what is being said, and an appreciation of the effect of words on an audience. They need to foster in their students an interest in and a perspective on language, its history, and the human and social attitudes which…

This research on factors influencing verbal learning and retention has used new techniques, attacked new problems, and tested new theories while trying to keep the experiments systematic. Studies conducted involved (1) the effect of varying the length of the intertrial interval on the learning and retention of different types of learning tasks;…

This study analyzed the effect of various stimuli on the number and kinds of words produced, the number and length of grammatical structures formed, and the quality of writing produced under four stimulus conditions. Third-grade students from Clarke County, Georgia, wrote compositions after (1) being asked to write a story (minimal stimulus); (2)…

This curriculum guide is designed for use in the first part of a 2-year audiolingual language program by French, Spanish, German, and Russian teachers, department supervisors and outside evaluators. The primary objective of the Language Usage course is to enable the learner to make his basic needs known to native speakers of the target language.…

This special report presents the resolution on language adopted by members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in April 1974, and the background statement explaining and supporting the resolution. The statement includes answers to some of the questions the resolution might raise, such as: What is meant by dialect? Why and…

Curriculum development in the United States has been based on the assumption that white middle-class values should serve as the standard for all of American society, but there is a need for courses in Afro-American communication which depart from traditional standards and categories of speech communication curricula. They should reflect concern…

This book is based on a large collection of material gathered over two years (1969-71) as part of the Schools Council Project on Language Development in the Primary School. It gives priority to the discussion of student-produced materials in primary schools, and its primary aim is to select for attention the more promising ways in which language…

The SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) Program, offered by the City University of New York at each of its college campuses, is a program of compensatory education devised to bridge the gap between college standards for matriculation and the existing academic level of its educationally unprepared student population. Placement at…

Contracted by the U.S. Office of Education, this program utilized a mobile office-education unit designed to provide office education to migrant workers in Brigham City, Utah, to thus expand their vocational opportunities. Stated objectives were that each student would (1) demonstrate "touch" knowledge of the typing keyboard and skills necessary…

Two centers of diffusion of the English language are (1) schools on the Navajo Reservation and (2) off-Reservation towns; these diffusion centers were studied to examine factors involved in language shift, especially in terms of internal (on-Reservation) and external (off-Reservation) contacts with English. Teachers in schools with Navajo pupils…

An attempt to shed some light on one type of linguistic structure, that structure which is sometimes called a structure of modification, is presented. The study is based on a fairly limited, but statistically ample corpus of 1,200 sentences taken from four metropolitan daily newspapers for the two years 1894 and 1964. From various sources a…

This study investigated verbal behavior of five third-grade children representing three cultural groups: Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean, and white. Ten sessions involving various language arts activities were tape recorded over a five-week period; session 7 was also videotaped. Sessions 3 to 10 involved group interaction across three interaction…

This paper proposes that curriculum theorists replace abstract language with more descriptive terms in order to achieve productive criticism, and it examines issues inherent in such a change. American educational discourse, traditionally focused on technical rationales, encourages theorizing, but a descriptive, aesthetic rationale might facilitate…

This study investigated the effectiveness of the Story Writing Scales of the Personalized Progress Assessment set in determining the writing capabilities of fourth, sixth, and eighth graders and assessed the relationship between students' story-writing competencies and their achievements in reading comprehension, vocabulary, usage, and spelling.…

Evaluation of a bilingual's proficiency in a second language (S) should consider the extent to which his performance is influenced by his competence in his native or primary language (P). An evaluation of proficiency in an S language should reflect the intuitions of S's native speakers. It is found that native speakers do not regard all instances…