This paper attempts a systematic approach to the teaching of word stress in the ESL classroom. Stress assignment rules from Chomsky and Halle and from Ross are used to establish the SISL Principle (Stress Initial Strong Left), for final weak-syllable words. On the basis of spelling, this rule can be applied correctly to 95 out of 100 cases. (AM)

In teaching children, a clear understanding of the conceptual content to be taught and an understanding of the linguistic means for conveying that content are necessary for the design of the most effective teaching program. The analysis of any given text for conceptual content must begin with an understanding of the language of the text. One…

The paper constitutes an attempt to provide a nonenumerative characterization of agreeing terms and agreement features. The following pertinent statements turn out to be (near) exceptionless: only coreferential terms agree, and for any given language all agreement features are pronominal ones. Four agreement features, gender, number, definiteness,…

A program designed to teach English as a second language is described in this paper. The primary objective of the program is to teach adult immigrants to discriminate and articulate English speech sounds so that they are able to participate in oral communication with the English-speaking community. Following a description of the program, the…

In order to verify claims made by Genevan researchers that linguistic production but not comprehension capabilities distinguish seriators from nonseriators, three tasks were administered to children between the ages of four and eight. Subjects were asked to arrange in order objects varying in size, to describe how the objects differed from each…

The Committee for General and Technical Education of the Council of Europe commissioned a comparative study of modern language teaching in European primary and secondary schools, the results of which are presented here. School systems and plans of primary and secondary education in the 21 member states of the CCC are reviewed, along with the…

This paper is divided into two sections related to an experimental program in English for black Americans. The first section is a report describing the program. In 1969, approximately 150 black students from urban ghettos in the North and rural communities in the South were admitted to the University of Wisconsin under a special scholarship…

The paper begins with a discussion of several recently proposed analyses of nominal compounds in English. It is then suggested that the relations which may appropriately underlie nominal compounds of the type Noun + Noun can best be defined negatively, i.e. by listing those relations between two nouns which cannot underlie compounds rather than…

In a relatively short period of time, language teaching has been inundated with audio-lingual technique, descriptive linguistics, contrastive analysis, structural linguistics, immediate-constituent analysis, transformational-generative linguistics, the Roberts Series, contrastive rhetoric, bilingualism, and bidialectalism. It takes a teacher's…

A detailed, spectrographic analysis of two lectures, given by Diego Rivera and Margaret Mead, which were chosen for their realistic naturalness, permits a graphic presentation and description of the patterns of three types of intonation within the declarative sentence in Spanish and American English. They include a minor continuation (A), major…

The "War on Poverty" has focused on the economic, educational, and social disadvantage of great segments of our population. Prominent among the disadvantaged is the North American Indian, living in the mainstream of the dominant culture and in the more isolated setting of the government reservation. One of the basic difficulties faced in efforts…

Spanish spoken in Mexico City is influenced considerably more by indigenous dialects than by archaic or present usage of peninsular Spanish. Six areas in particular fall under this influence: (1) the phoneme "s", treated as a palative and fricative sound, (2) voiced "s", which is dental alveolar and affricate, (3) "t"…

A brief glimpse of the on-going process of loanword borrowing in a bilingual culture is accompanied by frequent examples. The phenomenon described as "reverse borrowings of English corruptions" refers to linguistic occurrences in which the native speaker adapts a loanword which is, in fact, a corrupted version of his native language which he does…

Pedagogical implications of transfer of training theory and of an assumed universal grammar, as related to second language learning processes, are reviewed in this article. In recent years, the concept of a universal grammar has lost its credibility. The author urges, however, that grammar be conceived as a process or method of generating or…

Using frequency, range, availability, and coverage as objectively weighted indices of utility in the development of a basic French vocabulary list, the authors describe the technical procedure used in this study and list the resultant first 153 words according to the four indices and the utility rating. Weighting factors for each index, based on…