An analysis of indirect objects in San Jeronimo Mazatec describes the superficial characteristics of indirect objects and the constructions in which indirect objects occur. It is argued that they occur as prepositional phrases that are obligatorily incorporated into the verb in a specific way. The constructions containing indirect objects are…

English prepositions are generally considered difficult to teach to nonnative speakers, for a variety of reasons: the large number of possible meanings for many prepositions, which change according to the context in which they are used; the lack of a written guide to usage; and, for native Arabic speakers, the commonly-used grammar-translation…

A collection of 56 classroom games to be used in grammar instruction in English as a second language includes five game categories: (1) traditional, competitive games modified to allow students to work in small groups and show themselves and the teacher how much or how little grammar they know; (2) Silent Way or Silent Way-inspired exercises in…

Concerned with improving student comprehension of text, this book focuses particularly on teaching students how sentences tie together. Articles in the three sections are grouped as follows: Part 1, What Is Cohesion Comprehension? contains "Cohesion, Coherence, and Comprehension" (Alden J. Moe and Judith W. Irwin); "Identifying…

A heuristic procedure can be used to teach organizational skills to students of technical writing. Designed to allow students on their own to explore ways that numbers can be used to give a definite shape to technical information, its central feature is a matrix composed of a series of control numbers (horizontal axis) and organizing concerns…

In a study of young children's use of conjunction in narrative discourse, different types of discourse were collected from 34 preschool children: visually prompted stories, stories told without visual stimuli, responses to questions about the prompted stories, explanations of a game, and responses in interviews. The discourse was analyzed for the…

A study investigated the effect of adult correction of grammatical errors during the language learning process. Four girls and four boys, ages 2 and 3, were interviewed individually, tape recorded and asked to repeat an adult sentence exactly. Overt mistakes were corrected either with an overt correction with expansion or with expansion only,…

Knowing the connections between ideas and the interrelationships among groups of ideas is a skill that can be useful throughout the writing process. Writers who are aware of the meaning relationships existing between sentences and ideas can discover the logical possibilities inherent in their topic at the prewriting stage, determine patterns for…

A study and review of the revisions of professional writers reveals 11 functions of revision: (1) altering form, (2) organizing information, (3) creating transitions, (4) deleting information, (5) expanding information, (6) emphasizing information, (7) subordinating information, (8) creating immediacy, (9) improving syntactic structures, (10)…

"The Later Middle Ages: Civilization Reborn" in Ginn's "Our World," a chapter from a sixth grade social studies textbook, was assessed by the author, who used specific evaluation criteria. Although four strengths were indicated, the author dealt primarily with weaknesses of the text and made many suggestions for improvement.…

To determine whether older students make more revisions in their essays, more kinds of revisions, or "bigger" revisions than younger students, a study was made of revisions made by 30 randomly selected seventh grade and 30 randomly selected eleventh grade students. Students were asked to write and revise twice essays in which they described a…

Research on the grammatical cues that guide comprehension of a language and that children are most sensitive to, particularly in Hebrew, is reviewed as an introduction to the first phase of a study conducted with 20 native Hebrew-speaking children aged 4 to 9 in southern California and a group of adults to provide comparative data. The study…

Twenty randomly selected subjects in inner city schools at grades 2, 5, 8, and 11 participated in a study that examined whether (1) the number of cohesive units produced in writing will be greater for older students than for younger subjects; (2) the use of cohesive ties in consecutive sentences (a measure of awareness of audience) will increase…

Data from a language development project at the Polytechnic of Wales were used to compare the speech and writing of 48 monolingual English-speaking children. The 48 children came from three groups, aged 8, 10, and 12. For the collection of spoken data, the children, divided into groups of three, were tape recorded while they made a construction…