This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: oral language characteristics of college freshmen; the language development of a modern day "wild child"; children's understanding of relational terms; the relationship of…

This article discusses the incompatibility between the goal of communicative competence (defined more narrowly as minimal approximative communicative competence) and current practices of syllabus design, and suggests more relevant alternatives. Foreign language instruction is still dominated by the teaching of language structure for its own sake,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 49 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the relation of cognitive ability and receptive language ability in primary school children; (2) verbal cognition; (3) contextual methods of teaching…

Presenting data and analyses from the first wave of the study "High School and Beyond" (HS&B), a longitudinal study of United States high school sophomores and seniors, the report focuses on the composition of the Hispanic tenth and twelfth grade student population with respect to various characteristics; i.e., language use and…

A 1973 study of 341 Mexican American nonmetropolitan high school sophomores in South Texas and 300 Mexican American sophomores and seniors in El Paso high schools and a 1978-79 replication study of 89 metropolitan and 65 nonmetropolitan Mexican American youth explored the difference in their Spanish-English language usage patterns. Both studies…

This vocabulary guide is an alphabetical listing of English words and their equivalent in Chinyanja. A general list of verbs is included, as well as commonly used expressions for planned conversation. The basic expressions are intended for use in learning the health needs and problems of the Malawi community. (NCR)

From a consideration of variability in language-learner and language-user data, the concept of proficiency is considered in relation to models of second and foreign language learning. Proficiency is defined in relation to four separate dimensions: grammatical well-formedness, speech-act rules, functional elaboration, and code diversity. This…

This profile in outline form of the English language teaching situation in Sweden discusses the role of English within Swedish society and within the Swedish educational system. The status of English as the principal foreign language since 1945 for use in business, the media and tourism is pointed out. The system of English instruction in the…

The need for change in the way language is understood and treated in schools is discussed. It is important: (1) to see the need for knowledge of the language situations of the United States, (2) to support training and research to obtain such knowledge, and (3) to change the relationship between linguistics and education. The language situation of…

This report is a cross-linguistic study that compares the sequence of emergence of semantic relations in English with the sequence of emergence of these relations in the acquisition of American Sign Language. American Sign Language (ASL) differs from English in modality (it is a visual-gesture language rather than an auditory-vocal one) and in the…

The conceptual tools used in the communication/language objectives-based system (C/LOBS), which supports the front-end analysis efforts of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, are examined. The C/LOBS project, which is described in 13 volumes and an executive summary, functions as a subsystem of the instructional systems…

Based on the premise that comprehension must be the true and final goal of all instruction in reading, this book is designed to provoke teachers' reflections about their own ideas, reading, language, and experiences as teachers of reading comprehension and to help them base their teaching decisions on a knowledge of theory and research about how…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with the following topics: sex appropriate and sex inappropriate language; lexical retrieval and perceptual errors; naming deficits in anomia and aphasia; developmental discourse; pragmatic information and…

The main concern of this report is the nature of the reliance by children on prior native language (L1) knowledge in naturalistic, untutored second language (L2) acquisition. It is suggested that L1 reliance is systematic, in that specific conditions have to be met within the child's L2 development before he or she will, or can, draw on previous…

The general purpose of the Title IV-C Pilot Program (An Educational Needs Projection Model) is to develop procedures for forecasting the personnel needed by the Houston Independent School District (HISD) for a five-year period in response to current and expected legislation and changing student population. The present report reviews: (1) the…