This manual for seventh grade French instruction accompanies the early French immersion program. It is based on general and specific learning objectives and addresses the four language skills the child needs to develop. The introduction to the manual provides an overview of the program for the middle grades and learning objectives for the four…

A study examined the difficulties that 400 male Arab students, attending five universities in the District of Columbia, experienced with academic English while seeking college degrees. A survey investigated problems with nine aspects of English language proficiency: (1) expressing ideas correctly, (2) understanding lectures, (3) taking class…

The study describes ten discussion activities designed to improve the communicative abilities of Japanese learners of English based on cultural instruction goals. The activities target intermediate and advanced students, but teachers can modify the lessons for false beginners. All exercises stress speaking and listening. They focus on topics…

Instructional materials for beginning Sanaani Arabic, a dialect used predominantly for oral communication, include 40 units consisting of text derived from recordings of spontanous conversations of native speakers in various communication situations. Some of the lesson topics are: greetings, getting acquainted, appointments, telephone…

The communication activities described in this guide for English as a second language students emphasize functional competence over passive knowledge and focus on verbal strategies which enable students to interact. Communicative competencies are highlighted through stress on developmental levels (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and…

This paper: (1) reviews the development and implementation of a test designed to assess the competencies of public high school students in Atlanta, Georgia, preceding their graduation; and (2) presents the results of indicator cluster correlations between the new "Basic Skills Tests" and other reading and mathematics basal tests…

Information transfer techniques in the teaching of reading and listening in foreign language and English as a second language classrooms are discussed. Students may be presented with a written or spoken text and provided incomplete visual stimuli to be completed with information drawn from the text. The idea is that the learners are helped in…

A program (entitled "Across the Curriculum") that integrated speaking, listening, reading, and writing instruction into content areas across the curriculum, in Central College, Iowa, is described in this paper. The paper first discusses the formation of the program, which was predicated on a desire shared by faculty members in all academic areas…

Divided according to grade level, the objectives in this junior high school language arts curriculum guide cover such categories and strands as reading readiness, word analysis, obtaining information, studying, listening, written expression, speaking, literature, and linguistic components. Each objective in the guide is coded for the narrower…

The advantages of shared silent reading in the home and in the school for the promotion of literacy are numerous. At home the child may read silently in the presence of a parent who is engaged in a household task, or who is reading silently. In schools, shared silent reading may be used at all grade levels with groups of students in structured or…

A group of studies of children's understanding of narratives, the degree to which knowledge available in the child's first language is used in understanding second-language input, and the relationship between knowledge use in two languages as children become bilingual and acquire age-appropriate literacy skills are discussed. The subjects were…

One way to help the solitary student shape his or her ideas in writing is to arrange for the high school writing teacher to practice Peter Elbow's "believing game." This can be accomplished through a conference in which teachers bring drafts of some piece of writing they would like to work on. The heart of the conference begins as the…

The teaching activities presented in this paper focus on transforming the classroom into the Old West as a means of providing endless opportunities for writing, speaking, and listening in the areas of math, science, social studies, history, geography, music, and art. The paper contains directions for helping students to create scenes, in the…

Students in an ethics class may have their beliefs, attitudes, and values clarified if they have an opportunity to experience leadership through a particular process called the Dewey/Meiswinkel schema. The link between trusting behavior and ethics teaching that must be shown is the relationship between one's understanding of trust as a concept and…

The academic achievement in French of two cohorts of grade 9 students of a public school early immersion program in New Brunswick, which has total French-language instruction through grade 4 and includes all students in the program except transfers was compared to that of a group of native French-speaking students at a nearby French-language…