An English instructor at the University of Central Arkansas observed three problems students encounter with the often formidable writings of John Milton and developed strategies for alleviating those problems. The first problem was the difficulty posed by the vocabulary and syntax of "Paradise Lost." The instructor discussed with the…

The basic hypothesis of this study is that language education could be more effective if planning were to aim at developing an individual functional trilingualism involving a first (indigenous) language, a second African (national) language, and an official (foreign) language. The study covers the following matters: (1) a survey of developments in…

A stylistics-based approach to teaching poetry in the English as a foreign language classroom is examined. Since students may not have the linguistic skills to appreciate a poem, an analytical framework is proposed that includes the elements of repetition, confusion, and surprise. Reference is made to two poems, "In a Season of Unemployment"…

Noting that medical consent forms traditionally have been so full of medical and legal jargon that they have been impossible for even the educated layperson to understand, this paper presents a model for revising medical consent forms to make them more comprehensible. After describing the model, the paper explains each step involved in using it,…

A study of cross examination speeches of males and females was conducted to determine gender differences in intercollegiate debate. The theory base for gender differences in speech is closely tied to the analysis of dyadic conversation. It is based on the belief that women are less forceful and dominant in cross examination, and will exhibit…

The teaching activities presented in this paper focus on four literature assignments. The first explores the concept of love throughout two short stories, John Collier's "The Chaser" and Max Shulman's "Love Is a Fallacy." It contains a "true love opinionaire," a discussion of irony in the stories, and a follow-up evaluation. The second assignment…

A study used 18 television commericals, selected as representative of a variety of executional styles and products, and generated scores for each of them on 18 dimensions of structural variation. In addition, a multivariate analysis was used to examine the relations both among the dimensions and between these dimensions and some common measures of…

The paper demonstrates how contrastive linguistics may receive a fresh breath of life from approaching certain problems from the cognitive linguistic point of view. Cognitive linguistics is not only capable of providing contrastive linguistics with a comprehensive but coherent theoretical backbone the latter has always badly needed for its…

This paper analyzes patterns of code switching found in a small group of first and second generation Catalan immigrants in Mexico, and is part of a wider study on the impact of exile upon the construction of identity in the discourse of political immigrants in Latin America. With regard to the pragmatic exploitation of code switching, it argues…

This study examined the degree to which readers' affective responses to levels of language usage reflect their attitudes toward language usage. The subjects, 51 college juniors and seniors, read nine simulated newspaper interviews and completed five semantic differential scales that indicated their impressions of the interviewee's personality and…

This study examines one aspect of sociolinguistics: social cues affecting the choice of language in the speech of children bilingual in Spanish and English. The study is based on data collected from the speech of two children, from birth to age nine in the first case and from birth to five in the second. Analysis focussed on the identification of…

This paper constitutes an analysis of the audiolingual concept in terms of what it was originally intended to mean and what it has come to mean in second language teaching. Basic to the concept is the notion that language was originally a matter of oral communication, and that although writing and writing systems are central, they have secondary…

A major problem in doing linguistic research from tape-recorded material is finding specific tape content for later, detailed analysis of data. A project on use of language in medicine being carried out at the Cornell University Medical College has developed a method of cataloguing taped material that eliminates the need for transcriptions and…

The stated intent of this book is to "contribute to the development of more socially aware and more linguistically oriented classroom teachers and to provide these teachers with methods for implementing their new awareness." Four sections provide chapters that discuss various aspects of the phenomenon of dialect clash. A historical…

The acceptability of a sentence is dependent on context: some sentences look awkward in isolation but improve in an appropriate context, whereas other sentences look all right in isolation but fail to fit certain types of context. Of particular interest is the degree and specificity of textual fit of different thematic (theme-rheme, topic-comment)…