The many ways in which children use language are examined in this paper, and classroom implications are outlined. The first part of the paper discusses such topics as young children's focus on meaning in language, teachers' tendency to examine language in terms of form rather than meaning, and the importance of the student/teacher interaction…

The creative oral language elicited from 45 preoperational and 40 concrete operational first grade students was analyzed to study the relationship between cognitive development and the types of case relationships produced. Each child's language was analyzed for eight noun/verb relationships, including state, process, action, experience, location,…

A research project combining ethnographic and experimental methods is currently underway to assess whether minority groups use language in ways that put their children at a disadvantage in school. The project, which focuses on social, cognitive, and educational consequences of different patterns of language function and use, has involved…

This workbook is designed for second level students of Spanish and contains thirty units, each unit focusing on a selected topic and the Spanish idioms relevant to that topic. Each unit includes a list of the idioms, a dialogue containing the idioms, completion exercises, paraphrase exercises, and suggestions of activities to help students learn…

A rejoinder is presented to Betty Lou Dubois' article entitled, "British-Tradition English in the American University," which considers English West African English. Objection is made to the characterization of West African English in terms of errors. It is argued that there should be recognition of a "standard" West African…

To dispel the myths of linguistic deficiency among nonstandard English dialect speakers, evidence that repudiates these myths should be examined. These myths include suggestions that nonstandard dialects are ungrammatical and cannot be used to form concepts, and that speakers of such dialects receive little verbal stimulation as children. The…

Studies in the development of sexist language can provide insights into diachronic change in word meanings. Since semantic features are intimately related to the cultural and social matrices they represent, semantic change can be predicted on the basis of cultural constants as well as cultural changes. Prehistoric cultures can be reconstructed by…

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. The eight papers in the pamphlet were drawn from a seminar involving 11 geography, history, and English teachers and are concerned with…

The language performance and experiences of four eleventh grade Canadian vocational students were examined over six weeks in four individual interviews and four group discussion sessions. Additional data were collected by observing the students in their English classes and work situations. These case studies revealed the following: student…

Twenty-four English speakers from various regions of India were tested for the intelligibility of their speech. Recordings of speech in a variety of contexts were evaluated by listeners from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, and Germany. On the basis of the resulting intelligibility scores, factors which tend to hinder…

A DESCRIPTION OF SPECIFIC PROCEDURES FOLLOWED IN TEACHING A HIGH SCHOOL "CREATIVE WRITING" COURSE IS NEEDED BECAUSE COURSES BEARING THAT NAME ARE VARIOUSLY CONCEIVED BY TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS AND VARIOUSLY INTERPRETED BY SUPPORTERS AND CRITICS. SUCH A COURSE SHOULD BE DESIGNED TO AVOID THE CRITICISM THAT CREATIVE WRITING FOSTERS "EASY-GOING…

Essays and reports useful to English teachers are collected under four headings: (1) "Issues and Problems" contains a 1959 report on the basic issues of teaching English, the Report of the Language Committee of the School and College Conference on English (April 1940), and the Report of the Literature Committee of the School and College Conference…

The purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness with which composition skills could be taught by the traditional theme-assignment approach and by an experimental method using weekly multiple-choice composition tests in lieu of theme writing. The weekly tests were based on original but typical first-draft compositions and covered problems…

A china factory in Pennsylvania was the setting for a study of the characteristics of the factory, its workers, and the community. Specifically, the speech of 151 informants, representing 12 1/2% of the plant population, was analyzed for both careful and casual speech, in order to focus on lexical and grammatical forms which reflect regional and…

This paper gives the results of a controlled experiment on word association. The purpose was to establish norms of commonality of primary descriptive adjective responses to common nouns. The stimuli consisted of 203 common nouns selected from 10 everyday topics of conversation, approximately 20 from each topic. There were 350 subjects, 50% male,…