While few business people dispute the importance of carefully crafting persuasive, demanding, conciliatory, and bad-news letters, the regular flow of routine communications receives very little meaningful consideration or scrutiny. These routine communications (letters, inquiries, requests, collection letters, complaints, confirmations,…

This study examined the ways in which teachers of English as a second language (ESL) perceive the semantic and syntactic constraints that govern word use and the strategies they use to explain lexical anomalies to students. Twelve native speaking ESL teachers from 2 university-level intensive English programs were asked to identify, categorize,…

A case study analyzed the function of language (how language was being used and for what purposes) in a composition classroom from a systemic linguistic perspective. The subject was a young woman of Iranian-Macedonian descent and the researcher was the subject's composition teacher. The study focused on the subject's use of metaphor in relation to…

A case study explored two African Americans' perceptions of Black English (BE) in their writing of academic prose and the effect these perceptions may have on their own metalinguistic awareness. Subjects, two African American male undergraduates enrolled at Ohio State University who had difficulty with grammar or used BE in their writings, were…

A study examined the oral comments of writing groups at different grade levels to determine if students are actually able to talk about writing, what kinds of comments they make about each other's writing, and what effects their comments have on the composing process. Nine groups of from four to six members in the fifth, eighth, and senior high…

A study examined the differences in the appreciation of language ambiguity as represented in the word play of children aged 6 through 11 years. In six weekly play sessions, students were read stories containing many lexical ambiguities and pictures and were invited to verbalize and to draw similar ambiguities. Criteria necessary to the…

The background, research, development, and recommended use of a set of instructional materials for teaching listening comprehension to adult learners of English as a second language are outlined in detail. The materials were developed in response to a need for real-life language samples for use in teaching listening comprehension of English. A…

To test the hypothesis that induced mental imagery would facilitate the contemplation and reflection that have been suggested as being important to the writing process, a study investigated the effects of instructions to induce mental imagery upon the written language of young children. Subjects, 28 third grade children, were randomly assigned to…

This study aims to better understand the construction of the meaning of physics concepts in mechanics during a teaching sequence at the upper secondary school level. In the teaching sessions, students were introduced to the concepts of interaction and force. During this teaching sequence the models called "interactions" and "laws of…

A study was conducted to examine the relationships of four areas of textual design factors that are relevant to external students' learning as they use their course study guides: the micro and macro textual features, the linguistics, and the instructional design elements. Twelve external students from two units at the Gippsland Institute were…

Intended for administrators and policymakers as well as teachers, this digest examines the current state of the plain English movement, which is an effort to persuade government agencies, businesses, and professional organizations to write in clear, understandable English. After enumerating the benefits that the use of plain English can generate…

This activity packet offers simple directions for setting up a Morse Code system appropriate to interfacing with any of several personal computer systems. Worksheets are also included to facilitate teaching Morse Code to persons with visual or other disabilities including blindness, as it is argued that the code is best learned auditorily. (PB)

To find differences and similarities between spoken and written English, analyses were made of four specific kinds of language. Twenty adults, either graduate students or university professors, provided a sample of each of the following: conversations, lectures, informal letters, and academic papers. Conversations and lecture samples came from…

Listeners generally rate speakers of high initial ethos (such as university professors) using mildly self-deprecating humor highly on traits like "wittiness" and "funniness." A three-part study investigated whether a speaker of lower initial ethos (such as a student) can "get away" with such self-deprecation. In Experiment 1, college students read…

The literature of psycholinguistics and multilingualism is reviewed to examine the relationship between macrological social variables such as social class, and individual variables related to language behavior in a multilingual setting. The growing body of evidence assessing the link between certain social and community dimensions and specific…