In designing a curriculum to assist children in learning English as a second language (ESL), a thorough understanding of the differences between the first and second languages is essential. With such an understanding, problems and concepts that may cause language interference and learning difficulties can be identified and an appropriate…

A three-year curriculum of "Compact Courses" which was introduced in a secondary school in England is described here. The objectives of each course are terminal; the courses have no fixed length or pattern. The method adopted is that best suited to the teacher in view of the terminal objective. During the first 2 years, students take…

A study examined the differential effects of previewing textual information with questions containing higher-order versus lower-order information. The 104 college students in the study read three passages, each of which was preceded by different combinations of questions about information high or low in the structural hierarchy of the text, then…

The functions of blocking text with horizontal rules and providing headings of different types are discussed. Headings may be encoded or function as access structures, while blocking segments text and provides retrieval cues. These issues were tested in two experiments. College students read a 2000-word passage. In the first experiment, no…

This issue contains proceedings of a colloquium on linguistics at the University of Neuchatel: (1) "Propositions epistemologiques pour une etude du bilinguisme (Epistemological Propositions for a Study of Bilingualism)," by B. Py; (2) "Comment on di ca? Prolegomenes a une etude de la composante semantique du langage des migrants (How Do You Say…

A program of carefully controlled and guided writing can be an effective tool to help English as a second language (ESL) students overcome the difficulties they still have with basic English structure, as well as to expand their linguistic boundaries. Tailored to the needs and problems of adult immigrants reading at a level between grades 4 and 6,…

Language syntax is discussed, followed by an overview of algbraic syntax. Evaluating algebraic expressions was chosen as the means to investigate the psychological basis of syntactic skills. Subjects' ability to perform evaluative tasks appropriately using standard algebraic notation was ascertained; then similar tasks were presented using a…

By focusing on social and cultural backgrounds of the five U.S.-affiliated Micronesian states, this document highlight issues that pertain to education in this region. The first sections deal with the political history of the region, emphasizing the period of U.S. administration from the 1940's to the 1970's. The history of instititonalized…

The paper demonstrates how contrastive linguistics may receive a fresh breath of life from approaching certain problems from the cognitive linguistic point of view. Cognitive linguistics is not only capable of providing contrastive linguistics with a comprehensive but coherent theoretical backbone the latter has always badly needed for its…

Our linguistic environment is so polluted at every level that meaningless, uncritical pseudocommunication is becoming the preferred norm even among the highly educated. (JH)

The purpose of this study was to compare low readers and high readers in adult basic education (ABE) programs in New Jersey in terms of demographic characteristics, motives for enrolling in ABE, and desire to learn certain functional competencies. Fifty-two low readers and 52 high readers responded to items on the Interview Schedule of the Adult…

This paper provides some examples of American English that have been borrowed from other cultures and languages, and proposes that teachers develop students' lifelong reading interests through the study of folklore and dialect materials. Language development and appreciation relate to personal identity development insofar as individuals express…

The stated intent of this book is to "contribute to the development of more socially aware and more linguistically oriented classroom teachers and to provide these teachers with methods for implementing their new awareness." Four sections provide chapters that discuss various aspects of the phenomenon of dialect clash. A historical…

The acceptability of a sentence is dependent on context: some sentences look awkward in isolation but improve in an appropriate context, whereas other sentences look all right in isolation but fail to fit certain types of context. Of particular interest is the degree and specificity of textual fit of different thematic (theme-rheme, topic-comment)…

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…