Explores the need to implement the World Englishes (WE) perspective into international teaching assistant (ITA) programs. While traditional ITA programs typically view ITA speech as deficient and in need of improvement, the WE perspective asserts that intelligibility is dependent upon interaction between speaker and listener, thereby rendering…

PURPOSE: To determine empirically which of three frequently observed rules in children with phonological disorders contributes most to difficulties in speaker intelligibility. METHOD: To evaluate the relative effects on intelligibility of deletion of final consonants (DFC), stopping of fricatives and affricates (SFA), and fronting of velars (FV),…

Conversational speech is the most socially valid context for evaluating speech intelligibility, but it is not routinely examined. This may be because it is difficult to reliably count the number of words in the unintelligible portions of the sample. In this study four different approaches to dealing with this problem are examined. Each is based on…

Measurement of the mutual intelligibility of dialects of a language is discussed. The focus is on several theoretical constructs in measurement, illustrated with data from an earlier study of the mutual intelligibility of 17 Chinese dialects. Measurement procedures are also explained. It is proposed that mutual intelligibility is based on the…

Suggests that the loss of any good idea which cannot be shared because a person lacks the language spoken by the majority is a detriment to maintaining democracy. Such loss is what we may expect whenever the opportunity to learn standard spoken English is limited for any reason. (TO)

Viewing expression of affection as a problem in interpersonal communication, the author surveys psychological theories of affection and hostility. A brief summary of Freud's concepts of "death wish" and "eros" and a thorough consideration of Menninger's approach to re-direction of self-love are included, along with an overview…

Discusses some ramifications of the Conference on College Composition and Communication's resolution on "Students' Right to Their Own Language." (DD)

Presidential address delivered to the Linguistic Society of America at its Annual Meeting, December 28, 1972, Atlanta, Georgia. (DD)

Explores the Indian variety of English from the point of view of the discoursal strategies speakers adopt in verbal interaction. In particular, the paper examines how discoursal markers function in the Indian English conversational context. (29 references) (GLR)

Discusses a problem involved in teaching English pronunciation--the question of intelligibility. Previously intelligibility has meant that nonnative speakers were intelligible to native speakers; the increase in the use of English for communication between nonnative English speakers has complicated this issue. Implications for teaching and study…

Gondi, a Dravidian language spoken by 2.2 million people in central India, is a chain of dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible. This study looked at a two-step sound change, responsible for this dialect division. (ER)

This study investigates the learning exchange between three- to six-year-old children and their grandparents, in Sylheti/Bengali-speaking families of Bangladeshi origin and monolingual English-speaking families living in east London. The following concepts from sociocultural theory are applied to this new area of intergenerational learning:…

Discusses communication between multilingual individuals by means of a language other than their native languages. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)