A study investigated the distribution and specific use of adjectives and related expressions in the naturally acquired German of one Turkish and two Italian migrant workers in West Germany. The research was part of a larger study of untutored language acquisition by migrant workers in Europe. Specifically, this study examined the learning of…

A study examined whether children increased their vocabularies as a result of hearing unfamiliar words within the oral context of a story and observed the oral strategies the children employed as they attempted to define a new word. Subjects, 64 males and 64 females, were from self-contained third-grade classrooms in public schools in a small town…

Most freshman composition textbooks are inadequate in giving information to students on how to interpret dictionaries: instead of presenting them as aids in exploring word usage, textbooks foster a naive trust in dictionaries as arbiters of all usage questions. Rather than treating words as discrete items to be mastered without knowledge of…

The ability to retain many songs in memory makes them an important tool for language learning, but one that is often underused. A commercially-produced set of materials called "Singlingual" puts everyday German words and phrases to well-known tunes, a technique students can use to develop their own songs. In addition to readily-available…

The relation definition theory proposed in this paper is explicitly different from previous semantic memory theories since it is the first to make a relation's definition the basis of semantic processing. The paper suggests that this relation definition theory successfully predicts relation similarity on the basis of one key primary assumption:…

Intended to facilitate the preparation of thesauri for the indexing of documents in any subject field, this report presents a set of rules pertaining to the complex issues and questions involved in indexing vocabulary development and construction. After a brief discussion of the nature, functions, and components of indexing vocabularies, a set of…

A collaborative research effort to investigate the relative strengths of selected vocabulary development techniques was conducted by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the Taiwan Provincial Institute for Elementary School Teachers' Inservice Education. Parallel studies of children in grades 4 through 6 compared the two prior knowledge…

While vowels are not consistent at the single-letter level, they tend to be more consistent in letter clusters or higher order units. Therefore, a program designed to teach reading without resorting to teaching single-vowel mappings has been developed. The reading program involves teaching single consonants, selected whole words, and higher order…

Vocabulary grouped according to subject matter is well-adapted to developing speaking competence. Even in the use of blackboard pictures for teaching vocabulary, systematic aspects should be observed. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Using newspapers in FL teaching gives pupils experience reading original texts, and offers possibilities for vocabulary building. Here one must be aware of vocabulary differences between West and East Germany (FRG, GDR), particularly in ideological areas. The writer shows how vocabulary drills can be based on newspaper material. (Text is in…

The study of Latin is especially useful in enlarging the vocabulary. The primary aims of Latin courses are to develop communication skills. Acquainting students with the culture that is embodied in the language is another objective. But benefits accessary to the study of the language are not course objectives. (Author/RM)

Providing bibliographies, this article suggests components of the reading program that can be directly related to the language process via children's literature. (JC)

An analysis is made, with the help of a computer, of a number of different teaching vocabularies for Thai students of English with a view, first, to finding out how far they correlate with one another, and, second, to establishing as far as possible a teaching order within lists themselves. (Author/RM)

This book concerns a neglected aspect of the education of bilingual children, namely, their potential desire and ability to learn to read before age 5. The basis of the study is considered in the chapter on children as early learners, which provides accounts of children being taught to read from the age of 6 months to 4 years. The next part of the…