The edited transcript of an informal panel discussion about discourse conducted by the Discourse Linguistics Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association is presented in this pamphlet. The transcript also includes comments by the chairperson and by audience members. Among the topics covered in the discussion are the…

Three paradigms for assessing children's vocabulary knowledge were evaluated in this study: synonym, synonym in context, and cloze. The vocabulary tests, a paper-and-pencil adaptation of the on-line tests used in two previous studies, were administered to 830 second through seventh grade students. Subjects performed similarly on the three formats…

This introduction to the historical study of language is designed to give ninth-grade students contact with the methods of historical linguistics in a relatively limited area--the study of the lexicon. The unit begins with a consideration of recent changes in the lexicon, especially those due to technological advances which have caused the use of…

A bibliography of almost 1,100 items on the college teaching of English is arranged according to the following categories: (1) General, (2) Curriculum, (3) Composition, (4) Rhetoric, (5) Literature, (6) Composition and Literature, (7) Linguistics and Composition, (8) Grammar, (9) Linguistics, and (10) English Language which is subdivided into…

To increase the efficacy of visual instruction, more must be known about the operational forces within the image, and the determining factors in picture quality as a means of communication. The theory of information applied to this analysis of pictorial content, the fundamental thesis being that the value of an image depends on its content of…

Concepts advanced by grammarians, linguistic historians, dialectologists, psycholinguists, lexicographers, semanticists, and phonologists, together with new approaches to reading, spelling, and literature, can help the teacher make the English program more stimulating for children. For instance, discoveries made by psycholinguists have attested to…

The second version of the Multistore Sentence Analysis System, implemented on an IBM 360/65, uses a correlational grammar to parse English sentences and displays the parsings as hierarchical syntactic structures comparable to tree diagrams. Since correlational syntax comprises much that is usually considered semantic information, the system…

This collection of seven significant articles on higher thought processes stresses the important relationship of these processes to the teaching of language skills. The articles are: (1) "Language and the Habit of Credulity" by Russell G. Stauffer. (2) "Research on the Processes of Thinking with Some Applications to Reading " by David H. Russell,…

This study proposes that avoidance of a structure by a second language learner can only be claimed for instances where it can be demonstrated that the learner "knows" the avoided language form and that native speakers are expected to use a particular form in that context. Research is reviewed, particularly a study by J. Schachter (1974) in which…

A sentence completion task was used to investigate age differences in childrens' ability or inclination to invoke premises and inferences during prose processing, tasks which (according to the constructive hypothesis) adults typically perform. A pilot study confirmed that the sentence completion task was preferable to the recognition paradigm,…

Noting that a study of semantics can inform teachers' understanding of the reading process, this paper describes seven basic types of meaning, illustrates how the interrelatedness of meanings within a semantic field may be shown, and discusses children's acquisition of semantic fields. It cites research into the development of semantic fields in…

The cognitive processing strategies of two groups of French-English bilinguals were studied by means of an auditory Stroop test designed to evaluate cerebral hemispheric involvement. An "early bilingual" group were bilingual before the age of five, and a "late bilingual" group were bilingual after the age of ten. Stimuli were…

This research project examined the relationship between the psycho-social malaise, alienation or anomia, and each of four psycholinguistic or semantic habit patterns: irrational ideation, identity orientation, uncritical inference behavior and allness orientation. In so doing, it sought, generally, to explicate alienation in terms of semantic…

Many speakers of Modern Greek have an exaggerated notion of the superiority of their language vis-a-vis Turkish and the languages of Southeastern Europe. It would therefore come as a surprise to some Greeks that Modern Greek lexical elements in Romanian have undergone a substantial stylistic demotion during the past century or so. In this paper…

Speech errors have been used in the construction of production models of the phonological and semantic components of language, and for a model of interactional processes. Errors also provide insight into how speakers plan discourse and syntactic structure,. Different types of discourse exhibit different types of error. The present data are taken…