A free response cloze test was administered to 31 third graders to test the hypothesis that qualitative as well as quantitative differences in syntactic abilities or skills exist between good and poor readers. The subjects were divided into two reading level groups (good readers and poor readers) according to their scores on the SRA Assessment…

Chapter I, an introduction to machine translation of languages, contains a simplified description of electronic computing machines, and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation research. A historical background of machine translation of languages is given, together with a description of various machine translation…

The thesis that classroom instruction in the grammatical forms of a language is undesirable, currently held by a number of applied linguists, is rejected. However, although it has been found that inducement of grammatical consciousness is not necessarily a pedagogical liability, its worth depends to a large extent upon the kinds of facts to be…

It is possible to apply the concept of surface-structure constraint to a particular area of Hungarian syntax. A surface-structure constraint, according to David Perlmutter, can be seen as a template which serves as a filter at some level after the transformational component. In the case of Hungarian cooccurrence of noun phrases and verbs in a…

Discusses the continuing controversy over how to teach grammar. Finds that the traditional, structural, and transformational approaches each have their strengths and weaknesses, with none clearly better than the others. Suggests that the teaching of grammar, while not the key to improvement in written English, will always have a place in the…

Discusses first and second language acquisition in terms of behavior modification and structural exercises in terms of operant conditioning. The validity of the comparison is also discussed. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Article relates a language research study that found that children have not thoroughly mastered the passive transformation by the end of the first grade. (Author/ML)

Five- and seven-year-old English and Spanish speaking children were tested on short term memory, perceptual matching, and referential communication tasks to determine the relationship between linguistic coordination and language group. English speakers had significantly lower performance on the communication and perceptual tasks. (Author/APM)

The author makes a case for teaching traditional prescriptive grammar for 10 weeks at the beginning of the tenth grade. (JM)

The speed at which sentences with various kinds of violations could be rejected was studied. Compatible with the sequential model was the finding that noun-verb and adjective-noun double violations did not result in shorter reaction times than noun-verb single violations, although double violations were judged less acceptable. (Author/RD)

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are…

This paper addresses the issue of whether second language (L2) learners can reset parameters, by testing English speakers learning Spanish on their ability to reset the subjacency and bounding node parameters. The bounding nodes are IP and NP in English and CP and NP in Spanish. Eight American graduate students, highly proficient in the Spanish…

The importance of assessing language proficiency levels and the relationship of this priority to the teaching of Russian at the university level are discussed. Serious concerns about the value of language-specific proficiency guidelines are raised, and an argument is presented suggesting that language-specific guidelines may lead to undue emphasis…

In regard to the teaching of English, which is replacing French as a foreign language, Viet Nam presents some unique aspects and some individual problems. More secondary school students are selecting English as their foreign language choice; English departments in the universities are expanding rapidly; the teacher shortage is increasing. One…

Rhetoric is the most important of the writer's tools, and structure in writing is not being taught in the classroom. Structures of writing are the archetypal patterns of perception and grow out of the very structure of the human mind. Structure is imposed on the writer who wants to communicate by the reader's capacity to perceive. The analytical…