A classroom activity using passport forms that students fill out themselves by interviewing classmates is described. The passport lesson is structured to be self-contained, presenting all necessary structures and vocabulary for successful functioning within the unit. It may be used any time during the language program to reinforce an aspect of the…

Designed to provide an introduction to study skills for students in the eighth, ninth, and tenth grades, this teacher's guide provides a series of 12 activity-oriented units, most of which require one period of class time. The units in the guide cover the following topics: (1) learning to listen, (2) vocabulary (getting meaning from context), (3)…

This guide focuses on literature to entertain and literature to understand one's self. Designed primarily for independent use by students, several of the literary selections in each section of the guide are followed by the same sequence of questions so that students can develop a pattern for questioning themselves. The first section, on literature…

A study was conducted to assess the emphasis that elementary school teachers place on teaching vocabulary. The survey, distributed to 359 teachers in 7 school districts around the country, was completed by 228 teachers of grades one through five. Questions were directed at vocabulary instruction within the reading program as well as within the…

This book describes specific ways for teachers to assist their students in mastering skills needed for success in school. It is based upon the belief that thinking can be improved, human intellect sharpened, and academic ability increased. A case for study skills is made in Chapter I. Chapter II provides guidelines for the immediate improvement of…

To explore the usefulness of imagery as a learning tool in a classroom situation, this study investigated whether a visual image has an additive effect on the recall of definitions of previously unknown English words. One-hundred-forty-two students enrolled in six sections of an upper level developmental reading course at Georgia State University…

An individual who undertook the study of Lithuanian recounts his experiences in getting started and provides information about available materials and radio broadcasts in the language. Texts, tapes, records, and materials designed for children are listed and sources provided. Techniques found to be useful for independent language learning are also…

Using the counting features in previous mean length of utterance (MLU) studies, a study of the active vocabularies of adolescents looked at seven concrete features of the words 104 seventh grade and 100 eleventh grade subjects gave in response to 10 pictures. Each subject wrote five words for each of the pictures, which were analyzed for number of…

This instructor's guide contains the words to 23 popular songs along with guidelines and activities designed to help English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students improve their English skills while learning the songs. Each song is accompanied by a brief paraphrase of the content of the song, vocabulary and grammar exercises, and suggested teacher's…

Because language delay tends to persist, is predictive of later learning problems, and is closely associated with psychiatric disorders, it is important to identify language delay as early as possible. In this study, language delay at age 2 was investigated in 502 children who attended physicians. Language assessment is not routinely carried out…

Dictation in the language arts class most often involves lists of isolated spelling words. However, in France and in other European countries, the dictation of literary passages is a common activity in the language arts class and appears to be of great interest and benefit to students. Among the values of such dictation are the following: students…

A project dealing with the development of computer-assisted instructional materials to teach new vocabulary words to college students is discussed in this paper. Seven different instructional modules for teaching new words are being developed at the University of Pittsburgh; they are entitled: define, word relations, classify, words in context,…

Children's communication performance improves with age, which could result from increases in children's vocabularies, changes in their strategies of selecting messages from their vocabularies, or both. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate these explanations. Two types of communication tasks were employed. These data suggest younger…

This article deals with teaching vocabulary to advanced students of English through collocation, i.e., teaching a word in meaningful contexts. Ten collocation exercises are provided. (AM)