Seven papers are provided. Mary Rainey's paper, "Style Switching in a Head Start Class," considers speech styles used in the classroom. "Language Acquisition in the Deaf: Some Suggestions for Inclusion in the Field Manual," by Carol Pfuderer, suggests areas of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research relevant to the exploration of deaf…

This paper explores the implications of presumed language universals and language particulars for second language teaching and learning. It is felt that an awareness of the universal features of language design builds confidence in the student who can concentrate on features which distinguish the target language from the native language. Examples…

Assessment of the Spanish-speaking bilingual child's language dominance is essential to bilingual education, but to date there is no universally accepted way of doing this. There are many tests on the market which purport to measure language dominance and achievement, and which involve various criteria and methods. This paper describes four tests,…

A student's belief in the value of literacy is essential to effective teaching and successful learning, but can result only from a local culture whose aim is to produce literacy. The social identity and cultural norms of the young are registered in their use of language, and if literacy, as defined by others, calls the norms and identity into…

The identification of critical writing skills was the first step in a project designed to specify language skills that should be included in instruments for assessing students' entry into and exit from bilingual classrooms. Writing skills were screened according to three criteria: appearance on state or local competency lists, textbook emphasis,…

Group activities are outlined for a course for preservice and inservice teachers who wish to improve their skills in eliminating sex bias from their classroom and teaching practices. Program materials were developed around a three-phase training model. The first phase focused on increasing awareness of the pervasiveness of stereotyping in society.…

Educational cognitive style refers to a person's preferred ways of gathering meaning from surroundings. It involves four groups of behaviors: receiving, expressing, reasoning, and handling the receiving/expressing in specific settings or modalities. A comparison of communication and educational cognitive style shows that several ideas are common…

An understanding of dialect differences goes beyond the recognition that people talk differently; it concerns the way dialects differentiate themselves, the main differences in the patterns, and the method of discovering the patterns of various dialects. This booklet is intended for those who need to know more specific information concerning the…

The first part of these findings is a report on a study of the characteristics of 120 Spanish-English bilingual children's speech over a two-year period in the classroom, on the playground, and at home. Three types of language measures were used as well as audiotaped speech samples taken in the three communication settings. Preliminary findings…

Stereotypes about the way women talk grow out of knowledge of nonlinguistic, societally assigned sex role traits and of linguistic correlates of those traits. Among the findings of research on male/female speech differences are that, contrary to the stereotype, men talk more than women; men's conversation is task-oriented, while that of women is…

This paper proposes a tentative notational or marking system which attempts to provide more information on the sociolinguistic constraints upon the use of linguistic features than has been the case in other systems. A review of other studies in language variation, particularly those of William Labov, suggests that much can be done toward…

In an "Esquire" magazine column, John Simon attempts to trivialize, through visual satire, the articulation by Wayne O'Neil of the linguistic position that teaching standard English perpetuates oppression and is itself oppressive; but his attempt provides, instead, a vivid representation of the political relationship between the teaching of…

Native speakers of Egyptian Arabic make errors in their pronunciation of English that cannot always be accounted for by a contrastive analysis of Egyptian analysis of Egyptain Arabic and English. This study focuses on three types of errors in the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless "th" made by fluent speakers of English. These errors were noted…

Some of the errors in selected areas of English grammar and lexis made by a sample of 100 first year college students from Madhya Pradesh, India, were investigated. The errors of students are described in linguistic terms, and some of the probable sources of errors are explained. The rules of grammar and usage that should be established to help…

The nearly two hundred activities in this teaching guide for language arts in the junior high and middle school are arranged in five sections: studying language, communicating orally, reading and reading literature, writing, and listening and viewing. Each section opens with a list of activities, a brief introductory statement, and suggested…