Language teaching typically reflects current research, and, until quite recently, grammatical competence (e.g., in the Chomskyan sense) was the major target of linguistic research. Emphasizing the spoken language, the term "fluency," as applied to the foreign language performance of a language learner, is correlated to foreign language…

Observation of child language development is just one way to study how language changes over time. Developmental psycholinguistics shares much common ground with historical linguistics and with studies of languages in contact and the evolution of pidgins and creoles. By studying the way language changes, this paper focuses on clarifying the…

The linguistic abilities demonstrated by second grade students show a high level of competence in the use of syntactic structures and lexicon. This report describes and interprets, in terms of language function, the talking and writing of fifteen Australian children. Transcripts of conversations provide the basis for the linguistic analysis and…

Grammatical transfer is used to render the values and meanings of the structures in Romanian pronouns into English. This device can be used in explaining the exact nuances of Romanian pronouns to speakers of English. In translating from English to Romanian, a special problem is presented by the pronoun "you," which in Romanian can take…

Forms of address in Afghan society reflect the relationships between the speakers as well as the society's structure. In Afghan Persian, or Dari, first, second, and last names have different semantic dimensions. Boys' first names usually consist of two parts or morphemes, of which one may be part of the father's name. Girls' names usually consist…

Because of the language changes that have taken place in the People's Republic of China since 1949, Chinese can be seen as a language divided between the pre-1949 varieties and the post-1949 ones. What is taught in the United States does not reflect the current Chinese situation, partly because most of the native language teachers in the United…

Theoretical aspects of the spectator role in James Britton's (1970) model of language use are explored within a perspective based primarily on the work of George Kelly, Susanne Langer, Jean Piaget, Michael Polanyi, and Denys Harding. This view is amplified in a series of empirical studies based on stories told by children between the ages of two…

In this paper, the structure and the use of language are postulated as socializing agents influencing sex-role learning in three major ways: (1) sex differences occur in language use and parallel sex-role stereotypes; (2) the language that is addressed to children is usually the language of socialization which instructs the child what to do,…

This booklet consists of guidelines for teaching language usage and skills, oral and written composition, and listening in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. A statement of approach introduces the three main sections of the guide. In the first section, programs are detailed in charts under the following four categories for each of the three…

In comparing the written and oral English syntax of Mexican-American bilingual and Anglo-American monolingual students, this study sought to learn specifically whether these two groups of students represent the same speech population in English syntactic use. A total of 70 subjects were randomly selected for the four groups (bilingual and…

This paper discusses contextualization in the TESL classroom. Starting from the statement that fluency and comprehension are more important than absolute accuracy, and that to know how to use language students must "experience context in situations," a definition is attempted of the terms "context,""situation," and "experience." Situation is…

Basic to successful teaching of standard English to speakers of Black English is an assessment of teacher and student attitudes toward each language and their perceptions of one another's attitudes toward each language. Regardless of how innovative or unique methods of teaching language and communication promise to be or how instructive and…

The study examined 41 students (24 male, 17 female) in a beginning writing course for adults. Data were collected by (1) taping four workshop sessions in which all students participated in small groups, (2) interviewing all the students, and (3) observing four students writing in the classroom. The adult writers composed in two models: the…

The relationship between sociolinguistics and educational concerns is examined, the focus of the paper being to discover how current developments in sociolinguistics are contributing to the field of bilingual education. Following a brief discussion of related legislation, basic questions concerning bilingual program implementation are raised,…

The problem of this conference panel was to determine the interaction between the structural properties of text and the cognitive processes involved in comprehension. This panel report contains sections on the organization of the message in the communication system, the information readers derive from a message and how well they derive it, the…