The research presented here is a descriptive account, consonant with ethnographic methods, of interactions between and among family members in selected segments of documentary, prime time and soap opera television programming. The analysis of each program format was based on kinship relationships of participants, topics of conversation involving…

A role-playing procedure for elicitation of speech acts was designed to study aspects of the communicative competence of second language learners, namely, their language variation with respect to deference when the age and sex of the addressee are systematically manipulated. Sixteen Spanish-speaking adult learners of English as a second language…

This document is a compilation of the four issues in the 24th volume of "Classroom Notes Plus." issue of "Classroom Notes Plus" contains descriptions of original, unpublished teaching practices, and of adapted ideas. The August 2006 issue (v24 n1) includes: More Choice Leads to More Reading (Amy Ishee); Book-of-the Month Reports (Patricia Crist);…

Educators suggest that children whose families have read to them during their preschool years acquire lexical and syntactic knowledge of sentence-level features typical of written narrative before they begin formal literacy instruction. To test this claim, to discern growth in this knowledge over time and experience, and to describe the lexical…

Intended to chart the interconnections of linguistics, stylistics, and the teaching of composition, this book encourages a productive collective effort to cultivate linguistics among teachers of writing. Chapter titles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Grammar in American College Composition: An Historical Overview" (R. J. Connors);…

Even though enrollment in elementary schools and national literacy rates have increased greatly in India since its independence in 1949, the number of dropouts and illiterate individuals will also continue to increase unless the needs of the socially disadvantaged are identified and met. The majority of the dropouts and the illiterates belong to…

This book presents the results of a study entitled "What Counselors, Educators, Psychologists and Others Should Know About the Hispanic Culture in Order to Work More Effectively with Hispanic Students and Their Parents" funded by the California Department of Education in 1982-83. Approximately 500 people (Hispanics and Non-Hispanics) from 19…

A major goal of ESL education is to teach students how to speak English well enough to converse spontaneously and naturally with native speakers. Discourse analysis provides an understanding of those skills second language learners need to acquire to converse with native speakers and an understanding of how these skills may most beneficially be…

Evidence shows that there are differences in the ways in which men and women speak. It has also been well documented that females are generally ahead of males in language acquisition and are less often diagnosed as speech pathologic. A review of the research gives some indication of the reasons for the development of sex differences in spoken…

This volume presents seven papers on topics about second language instruction, language research, and applied linguistics. titles include: "Grammar and Its Teaching: Challenging the Myths" (Diane Larsen-Freeman); "Cross-Cultural Writing and Rhetorical Styles: Toward a 'Socially Realistic' Contrastive Rhetoric" (Yamuna Kachru); "Mother, I'd Rather…

Papers on applied linguistics and language pedagogy include: "A Genre Analysis Study of 80 Medical Abstracts" (Kenneth Anderson, Joan Maclean); "Oral Classroom Testing in an Adult French Community Class" (Sheena Davies, Aileen Irvine, Jacqueline Larrieu); "Whose Relevance? Interpretation of Hybrid Texts by a Multiple…

An approach to translation is discussed which takes into account the sociolinguistic factors involved in a translated document designed for use with a linguistically, culturally and educationally heterogeneous population, such as the U.S. Spanish-heritage community. The translation project described resulted in the Spanish-language questionnaire…

The main purpose of this study is to measure the attitudes of teachers toward speech varieties used by speakers of Black English and to determine whether there is any evidence that those attitudes are linked to pupils' classroom performance in reading. Also investigating is whether exposure to information about and experience with varieties of…

Middle Eastern students face cultural conflicts in adapting to the western value system. While feeling obligated to maintain their native culture they also need to feel comfortable with the culture of their target language. In attempting to identify with a new group, ESL students may sense a loss of membership in their native group. Culture stress…

This paper examines: (1) the use of questions by children at different levels of proficiency in Spanish and English, and (2) the congruency between the language constructs used to measure language proficiency and the natural language repertoire of children as seen in video-tapes of classroom interaction. A quantitative analysis of the data…