A study of the process of bilingualization of second-generation immigrants to Catalonia, a region of Spain, is described and summarized. The study looks at the interrelationships between (1) linguistic context, all sources of messages in natural speech; (2) linguistic behavior, the real communicative use the individual makes of his expressive…

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…

Fifty-five structures of the Chinese language are described and their particular usage patterns are discussed for the use of teachers, linguists, and advanced students of Chinese. Each structure is listed by its major structural element(s), its grammatical element(s), or a combination of the two. The examination of each structure consists of an…

This study compared student performance on language-usage test items presented in two different formats: as discrete sentences and as items embedded in passages. American College Testing (ACT) Program's Assessment experimental units were constructed that presented 40 items in the two different formats. Results suggest item presentation may not…

The historical background and the current status of Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, where it is designated as the national language, and in Uganda, where it has assumed a less prominent role, are described. Major factors contributing to the selection of national languages in the region are presented. The ways both linguistic and sociopolitical…

Early speech-act theorists studied isolated speech acts, often in terms of single sentences invented by the investigator, an approach that had obvious limitations. It is now known that speech acts ought to be investigated by looking at utterances in their full interactional context. A hierarchical model of the structure of conversation that is…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the ethics of violence as political strategy in contempory drama; (2) the history of Italian-American theatre from 1900 to 1905; (3) the development of the…

It is not enough for students of English as a second language enrolled in English-language elementary school programs to speak English fluently at the conversational level; they must be provided with language and an environment for continuing cognitive development through the application of high-level thinking skills, often without the benefit of…

A Hungarian teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) chronicles her research on the use of the cloze procedure in her native country's EFL classes. The research began as an effort to convince other teachers of the test format's usefulness, and ultimately led to further study of the factors affecting responses and scoring and the…

To investigate the rhetorical relations between oral and written texts in adolescents' academic discourse, a study examined oral and written language samples of three high school juniors in a San Francisco area middle class suburban community (two males and one female) participating in an English literature class. Discourse analytic techniques…

Prepared by college teachers of writing who are also teachers who write, the papers in this collection appear in a sequence that begins with theoretical issues and problems, moves through the stages of the writing process, and ends with a discussion of revision and evaluation. Specific topics covered in the papers include (1) language theory and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) conditional constructions in modern English; (2) phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on vowel height; (3) neural coding of pitch; (4) the…

A study compared student performance on language-usage test items embedded in a passage when the location of the answer was varied. American College Testing (ACT) Assessment experimental units were constructed that presented 35 items whose sequence of foils was varied so that each foil appeared once as the "no change" option embedded in…

A sampling of over 100 ideas submitted by elementary school teachers at the Idea Exchange at the annual meetings of the National Council of Teachers of English are contained in this collection of teaching tips. The first chapter, "Getting to Know Each Other," includes games to help students learn each other's names, directions for making a…

Many influential style guides endorse the stylistic prescription that writers, particularly technical writers, should revise noun compounds into phrasal or clausal paraphrases. While the prescription is well-intentioned, it fails to take into account that a reader's comprehension of compounds, whether long or short, is a complex process dependent…