A series of computer programs and routines intended to assist researchers in the analysis of language usage--with a power comparable to statistical computer routines--was developed by the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL). This document is one of a series that describes the design specifications for the individual modules which comprise the…

An evaluation of children's ability to conceptualize auditory pattern contrasts was made. At the end of the 1968-69 school year, 56 kindergarteners, 31 first graders, 24 second graders, and four fourth graders were tested on their ability to conceptualize the sequential relationships of phonemes in both nonsyllabic and syllabic patterns. An…

Some 2,200 expressions with illustrative sentences in Russian are contained in this dictionary intended for use as a reference work by students in intermediate and advanced Russian studies. The idioms or colloquialisms are rendered into English and are derived primarily from the classics of Russian literature. The dictionary covers phraseological…

In this unit on the dictionary, for the eighth grade, sample worksheets and discussion questions employing excerpts from various dictionaries (e.g., "English Dictionary 1775,""Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall, 1604,""Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary." and "Webster's Third International Dictionary") both…

Three hypotheses concerning the degree to which understanding of various conjunctions is related to reading comprehension were tested. Four instruments, two standardized tests and two designed for the experiment, were administered to a stratified sample of Mansfield, Ohio, fourth-grade students. The first hypothesis--that there is a significant…

The problem of determining the nature of this special form-class is seen in historical, linguistic perspective. A syntactic definition of predicatives as a word class with five types of morphological variation is included. The establishment of a word class or subclass on such a syntactic basis is suggested. (RL)

Two hundred and twenty-five fourth, fifth, and sixth graders who represented a relatively wide range of abilities and socioeconomic backgrounds were the subjects of this study designed to investigate the relationships between language-pattern encoding (spelling) and reading proficiency. The two primary null hypotheses were (1) that knowledge of…

Ways that the teacher can make communication skills instruction relevant to the learner are emphasized. It is suggested that teachers (1) learn more about our language structure, (2) study the particular environment and language of students, (3) emphasize strategies of word attack in context rather than teach lists of individual sight words, (4)…

This study examines the theory of Prokosch concerning the Germanic-Slavic-Baltic tense and aspect systems. The interrelatedness and influence of languages and dialects in Slavic (Russian and Old Church Slavic), Baltic (Lithuanian), and Germanic (Old High German and Gothic) are demonstrated. Examples illustrating the use of the perfective present…

A contrastive analysis of some phonological, morphological, and syntactical differences existing in French and English are cited along with suggestions for teaching each variation by the systematic approach. Also discussed briefly are such language interference problems as auditory discrimination of segmental and supra-segmental phonemes,…

Four researchers discussed their studies of oral reading miscues within a round-table format. After each participant's description of the specific concerns and procedures of his study, the following topics were discussed: description and analysis of the miscue, correction strategy, relationship of the child's language to the language of the…

Results of a study involving an experimental and a control group of first-semester, college students in a required language course concern the use of the French dictee in the classroom as a testing and teaching technique. Performance on written and oral examinations indicates that dictation practice stimulates awareness of the written language,…

To find out if a computer could be programmed to efficiently analyze the psychosocial factors in the speech of children, taped language samples were collected from structured interviews with 81 male and 63 female kindergarten children. Thirty psychological and social factors relevant to children's speech were drawn from the words in the samples. A…

The results of a project which investigated the speech of black respondents enrolled in the intermediate grades are described. From the data, materials and audio tapes were developed that could be used in helping preservice and inservice teachers identify morphological and syntactic features of black dialect. The concepts used in developing the…

This report describes an investigation of the acquisition by children of a symbolic system, specifically English nomenclature--that set of nouns that serves the function of naming, denoting, or referring to objects. The five studies involve nine experiments dealing with one or another of the aspects of this problem. Two questions guided these…