A study analyzed the characteristics of one male physician's foreigner talk over the telephone with non-native speakers (NNSs) of English and compared it to that of native speakers (NSs). The conversations all related to requests that patients come into the office for a periodic, preventative physical exam. Data came from tape recordings of the…

A study investigated the interpersonal dynamics occurring in an ungraded bilingual education class of native Spanish-speaking students in an ungraded primary classroom (with 10-12 students each from grades one, two, and three) at Garamond Elementary School in a working class community southeast of Los Angeles, California. Six classroom sessions…

Highlighting similarities in the processes of reading and writing can help teachers establish a more unified program allowing students to develop skills that transfer from one process to another. One activity to help students develop reading skills focuses on the "who, what, where, when" types of patterns that recur in sentences and…

A contrastive study of Japanese and American English sought to explore how speakers agree and disagree in the two languages. Japanese-speaking college students and American English-speaking teachers of English as a foreign language were informally questioned about food preferences, with their comments surreptitiously recorded for analysis. Results…

A study of the process of bilingualization of second-generation immigrants to Catalonia, a region of Spain, is described and summarized. The study looks at the interrelationships between (1) linguistic context, all sources of messages in natural speech; (2) linguistic behavior, the real communicative use the individual makes of his expressive…

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…

Fifty-five structures of the Chinese language are described and their particular usage patterns are discussed for the use of teachers, linguists, and advanced students of Chinese. Each structure is listed by its major structural element(s), its grammatical element(s), or a combination of the two. The examination of each structure consists of an…

Early speech-act theorists studied isolated speech acts, often in terms of single sentences invented by the investigator, an approach that had obvious limitations. It is now known that speech acts ought to be investigated by looking at utterances in their full interactional context. A hierarchical model of the structure of conversation that is…

The details of a 6-year investigation entitled the Education Testing Service (ETS) Collaborative Research Project on Reading, which brought researchers and educators together in classroom studies of young children learning to read, are presented in this book. The first four chapters of the book describe the theoretical rationale, design, and…

Conveying an adequate conception of the nature of science to students is considered by many to be implicit in the broader context of what has come to be known as scientific literacy. It has also been demonstrated that possession of valid concepts of the nature of science do not necessarily result in better science teaching. This study examines the…

An analysis of Amuzgo, a language within the Otomanguean family of Mexico, suggests that it is an active-static language with patterns similar but not parallel to those of Chocho. In the report, data on the characteristics of Chocho are summarized, theory and research on active-static languages is reviewed, and the data on Amuzgo are presented.…

Sentence-combining exercises improve the psycholinguistic abilities of students developmentally ready to profit from them, by developing language skills used in the writing process. (JH)

This paper describes the linguistic development of two hearing sons of deaf parents. Both were exposed to an early language environment different from that of the average hearing child. At the start of the study, the boys were aged 3 years, 9 months, and 1 year, 8 months, respectively. When first observed, the older child performed well below age…

In this study, everyday mother-to-toddler speech patterns among disadvantaged and advantaged groups were examined in the home environment. The Schachter FIS-C (Functions of Interpersonal Speech of Caretakers) language measuring instrument was applied to mother speech in three sociolinguistic urban groups: black disadvantaged, black advantaged, and…

This paper discusses the English verbal inflectional system within the lexicalist framework. A lexicalist approach to syntax is one in which all syntactic grammatical relations, lexical items, and the result of transformations are subject to semantic interpretation. That is, semantic information cannot be generated by syntactic rules. A filtering…