A teacher has found a historical study of a newspaper's doublespeak to be consistently effective when it is used in an American studies classroom as a teaching model. As the Ku Klux Klan evolved in the 1920s, so did the Pekin, Illinois, "Daily Times's" deceptive coverage of the Klan. Doublespeak in news reports and editorials was used to…

Noting that words like "alienation,""ideology," and "hegemony" are cropping up in academic journals (particularly those journals that concern themselves with rhetoric) with more and more frequency, this paper explains some of the basic terms used by the political left. The paper notes that such terms tend to come up…

Debaters have several poor word-choice and word-formation habits that detract from their ethos as advocates as well as from the clarity of their arguments. In many instances, debaters, to their competitive and educational detriment, employ habitual phrases, questionable redefinitions, and poorly coined new words. Many currently popular debate…

This paper begins with an outline of some desirable properties of a communicative-pedagogical grammar. This serves as a theoretical point of reference for the subsequent description of a narrowly bounded semantic area, that of regret and relief. Conceptual analysis reveals a systematic relationship between these two emotions, which is…

"Contrary-to-face-value" (CFV) messages, which can only be understood from a contextual instead of a text-based approach to communication, have caused many problems in communication between East Asians and North Americans. A typology of CFV communication, as identified in the Chinese culture, is proposed in this paper. Four forms of CFV…

This report examines the transferability of five indirectness strategies realized by the "conventions of usage" of Japanese indirect requests when Japanese learners of English realize English indirect requests in four situations. Subjects representing two proficiency groups--beginning/intermediate and highly advanced--were asked to undertake an…

Exploring the concept of a "permeable" curriculum, this paper provides concrete examples of the social and cultural challenges of a curriculum that allows for the interplay between teachers' and children's language and experiences. The paper uses a recent study in an urban primary school to provide an illustration of the diverse kinds of…

A study examined the "oral" vocabulary used by newspapers over a 100-year period. Approximately 8,000 sentences containing about 200,000 words were chosen at random from the front pages of "The New York Times" and "The Los Angeles Times" for the period 1890-1989. Specific vocabularies were constructed for…

Written for children who are in the first four years of school, this handbook provides review and additional practice in language, grammar, and punctuation for students who may need such study. Younger children may need parental help in using the handbook, while older children may be able to read and understand the material for themselves.…

The intent of a liberal education is to enhance the student's freedom, the faculty of intentional choice. The capacity of humans to step outside of themselves, which allows development of self-concept and subsequently self-esteem, is potentiated by the humans' unique sign, the symbol. Each of the liberal arts is concerned with the development and…

Designed to grade children's knowledge of commonly used instructional terms in a particular language arts program, the AIT consists of a verbal part and a situational part. Each part assesses the same commonly used instructional terms: word, begin, letter, name, makes sense, beginning sounds, print, trace, capital letter, rhyme, period, stands…

Noting that the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor often used in the study of freedom of speech is drawn from classical economics, this paper cites J. Murray's definition of the concept as "the idea that citizens in a democracy are well served if opinions of all kinds, accurate or inaccurate, are freely circulated." The first…

Preliminary findings of a survey of Cherokee language and education and the data collection and analysis methods are reported. The survey was designed to study language use, bilingualism, and education in the Cherokee community. The scope of the survey encompassed Cherokee children between the ages of 5 and 14 who attended public school and lived…

Preliminary data from the High School and Beyond (HSB) research study are described in order to assist bilingual education researchers in understanding what information is available. The HSB project design included a highly stratified national probability sample encompassing 30,000 sophomores and 28,000 seniors enrolled in 1,015 public and private…