A study investigating favorable and unfavorable contexts for learning some word order rules in Swedish as a second language is reported. The rules examined are subject-verb inversion after a preposed non-subject in main clauses and the rules for placement of the negative particle. Subjects were 60 adult native speakers of Finnish, Polish, and…

Noting that the media can be powerful instruments in the hands of creative teachers, this paper explores the use of media as instructional tools to promote growth in thinking and language processes (primarily reading and writing). The paper views media form and applies it to the interrelationship of experience, thought, and language. It proposes…

One hundred thirty-nine college students participated in an experiment designed to examine the basis of their abilities to make relative importance distinctions among ideas in a text while reading. Subjects read two texts of 13 paragraphs each. The topics of the two texts were unrelated, but their topic structure was similar. For each of the…

Prompted by current theories in reading suggesting that variation in word knowledge affects the processing of not only individual words but also clauses and sentences, this report explores some different ways in which children's comprehension processes may be affected by variation in word knowledge. The report first examines whether the effects of…

An experiment combining listening comprehension training and error analysis was conducted with students at the English Language Institute, Queens College, the City University of New York. The purpose of the study was to investigate how to take learners who were primarily dependent on perceptive skills for comprehension and widen their…

When readers encounter the dissonance of conflicting ideas and are motivated by the psychological discomfort to resolve the dissonance, the effort to alleviate this discomfort may well result in the activation of those cognitive processes termed critical reading and thinking. With this in mind, one approach to teaching critical reading treats…

Researchers and teachers are beginning to realize that reading and writing are closely linked. Language experience is the key to success in reading and writing. Teachers must enrich students' language experiences by reading to them, talking with them, fostering an environment that recognizes their worth as language users, and modeling expected…

To explore the role of one specific revision strategy--reading and rereading pieces of text--in the composing process, case studies were made of two college freshman writers: Jim, who was highly apprehensive about the process of composing, and David, who was not at all apprehensive about writing. Specifically, videotapes of the students' composing…

This study focused on how French children aged 4, 6, and 8 years evaluate the conditions of use for modal expressions marking certainty and uncertainty in discourse. Children were shown films involving verbal interactions during which one of the protagonists produced a target utterance accusing another character of having performed a deed. Each…

An organizational framework consisting of the following four components is useful in exploring questions about improving textbooks: learner characteristics, learning activities, the critical task (for measuring student performance), and the nature of the materials. In considering learning characteristics and the materials, it is important to…

This paper advocates an integrated study of English rather than the traditional approach of studying language, literature, and composition. Its focus is not on designing an integrated curriculum, but on using this approach to develop reasoning skills for secondary students. One integrated curriculum program for the development of reasoning skills…

This paper discusses four kinds of reasons for studying child language. The first of the four, biological reasons, includes the desire to understand our own species and its place among other living things in the universe. The common human faculty for communication, the variability in language building, and the similarity of human communication to…

A study investigated whether young children use sentence accent to mark new information as systematically as they have been shown to handle contrastive stress within naturally-occurring discourse. Data were drawn from the spontaneous conversations of a boy-and-girl twin pair with adults. The twins' speech was coded in carefully-defined categories…

A study investigated children's difficulty in learning color words and attempted to determine whether the difficulty was perceptual, conceptual, or linguistic. The subjects were 24 two-year-olds, half with knowledge of color words and half without, and a similar control group. The experimental subjects were given conceptual and comprehension tasks…

Focusing on language development--from beginning speech to literacy--with particular attention paid to growth in writing, this paper identifies and describes: (1) links between speech and writing; and (2) features of children's written and spoken texts that indicate growth. The process of constructing "texts" is presented as the fabric…