THIS CONFERENCE REPORT BEGINS BY POINTING OUT THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE SPREAD OF LITERACY AND THE INTERESTS AND ASPIRATIONS OF NATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS IN ORDER TO PROVIDE SOME GUIDANCE IN THE INITIAL ALLOCATION OF FUNDS AND PERSONNEL FOR NATIONAL LITERACY PROGRAMS. A NEED IS SEEN FOR IMPROVED INTERDISCIPLINARY UNDERSTANDING, CLOSER…

Synoptic reports on 16 selected educational and community programs for Spanish-speaking people are presented in this document. Each report consists of a brief description of the project, an assessment of the program, and recommendations for dissemination and implementation of the project model. Programs reviewed include: (1) The Good Samaritan…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS EXPERIMENT WAS TO COMPARE THE LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR OF STANDARD AND NONSTANDARD ENGLISH SPEAKERS WHEN ASKED TO REPEAT STANDARD AND NONSTANDARD SENTENCES. THE SUBJECTS (47 THIRD AND FIFTH GRADERS AT A NEGRO SCHOOL IN WASHINGTON, D.C., AND 30 OF THEIR WHITE COUNTERPARTS AT A SUBURBAN MARYLAND SCHOOL) WERE ASKED TO REPEAT 30 TAPED…

This study investigates the feasibility of using cloze procedure test items (in which a student supplies a word, letter, or phrase to fill a gap in a continuous text) for the written College Board foreign language achievement tests. An introduction which defines the problem, traces its history, and presents the overall design of the study is…

This longitudinal study attempts to (1) describe the development of articulation of consonant phonemes through the 4th grade, and (2) explore the relation between articulation and non-articulation variables. Between the spring before kindergarten entrance and the 4th grade, 436 subjects were tested 11 times at 6-month intervals. On the basis of…

This report is the second in a series of four intended to study language attitudes and language maintenance among whites in the Republic of South Africa. The series is based on data provided by a large-scale survey conducted during 1973-74. The present report deals with attitudes towards using and improving usage in the second language.…

The acquisition of the consonant system by a child acquiring Mexican-Spanish as her native language is described. During the earliest stages (from 1;7 to 2;1 years of age), the data showed several phenomena that could best be accounted for by assuming a central role for the word as the basic unit being acquired. The evidence for the centrality of…

Six empirical studies have revealed undesirable effects of the use of the generic term "man" and its alternative forms to indicate both males and females. The studies have dealt with the effects of the use of generic terms and of the label "Male Interest" in job advertisements, the question of whether people perceive generic terms in sentences and…

A study was conducted of the capacity of sixth-grade children to communicate accurately paralinguistic affect. A dependent measure indicating the accuracy of paralinguistic communication of affect was obtained by comparing the level of affect which children intended to encode with ratings of vocal inflections from adult judges. Four independent…

This study of the linguistic acts of assenting and confirming is inspired by an attempt to create instructional materials for the learning of spoken English as a second language, with communicative competence as a goal. Observations are based on several hours of informal conversation between native speakers of English, mostly students and…

This is a report on a proposed research project on the interaction processes (verbal, non-verbal, and kinesic) present in a seminar situation, with a view towards positing a model of interaction in this type of situation. The seminar was chosen as a setting because it provides a structured context with a variety of discursive acts, favoring the…

Several focal points for southwestern American Indian English research are proposed. This variation is used on reservations or in urban Indian enclaves when the "Indianness" of the discussion or participants needs formal linguistic marking. One research goal is to demonstrate that tribal varieties of Indian English actually exist.…

This article reports on the language planning efforts in the non-Russian republics of the USSR, where the Turkic languages spoken are highly divergent from Russian. Specifically described are the cities of Baku in Azerbaijan, the language in question being Azerbaijani, and Ashkhabad, in Turkmenistan, the language being Turkmen. The chief language…

Forty bilingual Ss were tested in four experiments to see if decoding of linguistically mixed texts with one-word substitutions in the other language would take more time than decoding of unilingual material. The overall aim was to further explore the nature of the language switch mechanism as it functions in input. In the first experiment,…

This paper explores the relation between the communicative and categorical functions of language and the acquisition of language production. Three major factors in language acquisition are communication, ability for representation and the process of categorization. This paper offers evidence that a sudden and dramatic increase in lexical skill…