Implications of the behaviorist and cognitive theories in language instruction are discussed in this article. Some contributions of Skinner, Politzer, Valette, Morton, Lane, and Mueller and Niedzielski clarify the behaviorists' view of language as a myriad of conditioned responses. In turn, the cognitive viewpoint, seen as the acquisiton and…

Educational research in Australia is minimal, according to the author. And yet the need for improved instruction to reach poor and reluctant readers compares in seriousness with the needs in the United States and Great Britain. It is recommended that research should place less emphasis on comparative evaluation of teaching methods and an increased…

The English Oral Language Lessons were developed by the Foreign Language Innovative Curricula Studies (FLICS) of the University of Michigan. The lessons were designed for pre-school children of Mexican American migrant workers with an emphasis on the structure of English sentences rather than on vocabulary. The study was constructed to test the…

Designed for those involved in teacher education, the writing of instructional materials, educational administration, research, and library accessioning, this 712-item bibliography with abstracts acts as a current guide to authoritative and useful books concerned with foreign language teaching theory and practice. Although most of the books cited…

Oral exercises are classified by type and form. Types include repetition, substitution, conversion, pyramid, and combinations. Dialogue, games, play acting, conversation, and repetition are cited as forms. Sample exercises are offered as illustrations. (AF)

With the contention that increased concern over the status of reading requires that the experimental testing of reading hypotheses be conducted with the most modern methods of behavioral science and be based on a theoretical analysis of the reading process, both psychological and linguistic, this final report from a group of investigators pursues…

These volumes (with tests) on constructing effective English sentences are designed for secondary students who do not often hear standard dialects--e.g., the deaf, the disadvantaged, or the speakers of English as a second language. Transformational-generative grammar is used to describe the structures and operations that the student most needs.…

An investigation was made of the effects of the removal of certain grammatical categories from standardized reading comprehension test paragraphs on the reading comprehension of 180 third, fourth, and fifth graders enrolled in a rural Georgia school system. Each grade level contained a high and low reading ability group, based on standardized…

A variety of creative activities to stimulate elementary school children's curiosity and interest in the substance and structure of American English are listed in this paper. Over half of the 37 suggested activities refer to "Words, Words, Words" by Mary O'Neill and "The Language Book" by Franklyn Folsom. The other suggestions utilize additional…

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the sounds in American English and Brazilian Portuguese in order to focus on the problems that Brazilian students may encounter when learning to speak English. The comparative analysis of the consonants, vowels, and diphthongs describes how a given sound is pronounced in both languages. Particular…

The articles included in this book are intended to demonstrate the diversity of academic interest in the phenomenon of bilingualism. Articles treat Mexican-Americans, American Indians, and Suggestions for Further Research. The first two parts contain the following subdivisions: (1) Assumptions and Methods, (2) Language Resources and Development,…

The instrument described in this paper investigates the models used by subjects to divide their social universe into two mutually exclusive systems of interaction. This is done by means of motion picture films which portray three geometric figures in action and elicit stories about animated beings as they move in social space from informants. The…

Because listening is a vital part of language learning, listening skills should be developed as a learning mode. Pre-listening skills should be taught just as pre-reading skills are taught. Children in command of the auditory perceptual abilities which contribute most to listening will transfer these abilities to increasingly difficult listening…

The feasibility and limitations of speaker adaptation in improving the performance of a "fixed" (speaker-independent) automatic speech recognition system were examined. A fixed vocabulary of 55 syllables is used in the recognition system which contains 11 stops and fricatives and five tense vowels. The results of an experiment on speaker…

Two accomplishments have increased the feasibility of taking preparatory steps for the construction of machine intelligence systems which can acquire knowledge about facts or descriptions of facts through man-machine dialogue in the user's natural language. One is a better understanding of the relationship between perception, language, and…