This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: oral language characteristics of college freshmen; the language development of a modern day "wild child"; children's understanding of relational terms; the relationship of…

This article discusses the incompatibility between the goal of communicative competence (defined more narrowly as minimal approximative communicative competence) and current practices of syllabus design, and suggests more relevant alternatives. Foreign language instruction is still dominated by the teaching of language structure for its own sake,…

Test fairness or bias may be defined in many different ways, and the existence of possible bias is difficult to demonstrate. Sociolinguistic analysis may be used to check for fairness or bias in test directions, test content specifications, or test items. Four sociolinguistic principles are held to be relevant for this task: (1) pragmatics--that…

Social studies instruction will improve if educators understand and integrate information gained from pragmatics into social studies curriculum and methods. Pragmatics is an area of linguistic study based on the philosophy of pragmatism which emphasizes social consequences of events and actions. Pragmatics deals particularly with the relationships…

A review of the literature on child language reveals little research on overgeneralization in the speech of the bilingual child. Questions arise regarding (1) the existence of interlingual overgeneralizations, and (2) the possibility that monolingual deviations and bilingual code switching might be forms of overgeneralization. Because a model for…

The articles in this cross-cultural journal deal with practical issues in second language instruction, English education, the needs of the language learners, principles governing the creation of word pairs, and the process of building in-service language programs. The following articles are included: (1) "The Role of Redundancy, Function, and…

CONTAINED IN THIS VOLUME ARE THE REVISED TEXTS FOR PARTS THREE AND FOUR OF AN ESSENTIALLY AUTOINSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAMING PROJECT ORIGINALLY ENTITLED "SPOKEN FRENCH." REVISIONS WERE MADE TO REMEDY SOME OF THE INSTRUCTIONAL WEAKNESSES DETECTED IN USING THE ORIGINAL RECORDED MATERIALS EXPERIMENTALLY AND TO EXTEND THE AUDIOLINGUAL OBJECTIVES…

This paper investigates the development of negative Wh-questions in a four year old subject acquiring English as her L1. Spontaneous and elicited speech samples were collected over a period of 6 months. During the course of the study, the subject began to invert subject and auxiliary, and by the end of the study she was inverting correctly in 38%…

The main concern of this report is the nature of the reliance by children on prior native language (L1) knowledge in naturalistic, untutored second language (L2) acquisition. It is suggested that L1 reliance is systematic, in that specific conditions have to be met within the child's L2 development before he or she will, or can, draw on previous…

Interpretations of the differences between the African American child and the Caucasian child in North America follow two major trends. In one the differences in the African American child are viewed as deviance from the Euro-American norm and therefore inferior or pathological. In the other, the differences are viewed as deviant but adaptive…

The rise of American English as the medium for exhange of scientific and technical information worldwide is a linguistic phenomenon. For some time, applied linguists in Britain have provided texts to meet the demand for English for special purposes and English for science and technology. Their works use a British form of language and cover British…

This paper examines the proposition that languages may differ in their potential for non-sexist usage, and that the structure of a language, in particular the gender system, affects the nature of the linguistic response to changing social attitudes regarding sex roles. A brief historical survey of gender and sex-marking is followed by a review of…

These proceedings on applied linguistics and language learning contain the following papers: (1) "Audio-visual and Applied Linguistics; The State of the Question," by V. Ferenczi (in French); (2) "Research in Fundamental Language: The State of the Question," by B. Pottier (in French); (3) "Psycholinguistic Insights into Language Learning," by F.…

Initiated in 1965, the Standard Speech Development Program of the Pittsburgh Public Schools was designed to give junior high school students control of standard English speech through oral pattern drills based on particular phonetic or grammatical structures of standard English. By the end of the 1967-68 school year, pattern drills were part of…

While studies in learning and verbal behavior show that learning comes through paired-associate problems, they do not explain the acquisition of language. Three paradigms demonstrate mediation effect in paired-associate learning: response equivalence, stimulus equivalence, and chaining model. By reviewing children's language acquisition patterns…