The effects of a language versus a dialogue emphasis and a structured versus an unstructured follow-up in intensive language instruction were assessed using eighty-three students destined for missionary work in Spanish-speaking countries. A 2 X 2 analysis of variance design was employed, with students assigned to one of four treatments: language…

This report describes comparative evaluations of the Distar I (first grade) and Distar II (second grade) programs which were carried out in 1972-1973. Results showed: (1) the Distar program for first grades had no conclusive advantage over traditional instruction for the development of oral language or reading achievement; and (2) second grade…

A revised Spanish/English oral-proficiency test battery was administered to 40 Spanish-surnamed pupils equally divided by sex at grade levels 1, 3, 5, and 7. The test battery included parallel Spanish and English versions of: (1) a 12-item vocabulary pretest, (2) a 32-item vocabulary-by-domain test consisting of four sections--home, neighborhood,…

The methods for teaching language arts presented in this book are based on the premises that creative problem solving is the key motivation to the mastery of language and that when teachers and children work at mastering communication skills through solving problems creatively, they use basic mental skills--attentiveness, fact recall--or skills of…

The articles collected in this journal are devoted to the topic of teaching speech and theater in community colleges and junior colleges. "Here's Looking at Us," a report of the Association for Communication Administrators' (ACA) 1975 Denver conference on speech communication at the community college and junior college levels, details suggestions…

A group of Mexican-American children living in a small Illinois town were observed to study the acquisition of communicative competence. The children's spontaneous and elicited narratives showed combinations of Spanish and English. If three stories represented here are considered syntactically, none involves random alternation of codes. Almost all…

Formality as a style may be defined as language which reflects or "keynotes" the degree of familiarity between participants in a discourse. Working from this assumption, this paper attempts to answer the question, "How is formality best described?" Results of a series of tests indicate that informants' labels (with the…

Espousing the experience approach to teaching children language arts and a competency based approach to teacher education, this book can be used in methods courses as a workbook, during student teaching as a manual, and while teaching as a sourcebook for experiences that children enjoy. The chapters are designed as modules and cover eight language…

In devising an inventional scheme for considering black communication behavior with possible implications for a more general theory, four constituents must be considered: frame of mind, scope of context, structure of code, and delivery of message. The concepts of rhythm and styling seem indicative of the black frame of mind, while the contextual…

This book presents a sequence of learning activities that have been used with success in the foreign language classrooms of Kenston High School, near Cleveland, Ohio. The activities, based on group dynamics principles, are designed to facilitate relevant oral communication in the target language and, through this communication, to help the…

This book presents a sequence of learning activities that have been used with success in the foreign language classrooms of Kenston High School near Cleveland, Ohio. The activities, based on group dynamics principles, are designed to facilitate relevant oral communication in the target language and, through this communication, to help the students…

This article describes an experiment in early Welsh-English bilingual education which was begun in September of 1968 with 35 children and which continued for two years. There was one male teacher who used mostly Welsh and taught for one hour per day. The average age of the children at the beginning of the two-year experiment was five years, two…

The techniques of transformational grammar can be used effectively to identify and describe significant differences in the language competencies of children at several grade levels. The oral language responses of 150 elementary school children and 30 kindergartners (selected at random) to two silent, animated films of Aesop's "Fables" were…

To determine the influences of college work in English, of teaching assignment, of size of community, and of teaching experience upon opinions about the authority for standards of English usage, secondary English teachers in Oklahoma ranked items of usage as formal written or spoken, informal written or spoken, or uncultivated or illiterate…

This book offers inner-city language arts teachers suggestions to make the teaching-learning act more significant and rewarding. The compilation of innovative activities and ideas is divided into six chapters dealing with (1) the improvement of students' self-image, (2) children's literature, (3) written expression, (4) poetry, (5) oral language…