To determine the effects of oral sentence-structure exercises upon student writing, a 1-year experiment was conducted with two randomly matched fourth-grade classes of approximately equal size, one control class and one experimental class. The experimental group regularly completed exercises designed to teach students to produce sentences…

Previous studies have defined the earliest stage of child language to be the stage at which an uninitiated speaker of adult language can understand sentences spoken by the child. Upon the examination of the language of one child, aged 1 year and 7 months, it became evident that she could talk, even though it was equally evident that she didn't use…

The purposes of this study were to replicate the effects of question placement, either before or after, on the acquisition of critical and incidental material with grade school subjects and to determine the effects of paragraph length on learning with children. Two variables, question placement (BA) and pacing (PL), were combined in a 2 x 4…

The purpose of this investigation was to compare the effects on achievement and attitude of a method of teaching using multi-media self-instructional learning activity packages, with the conventional method of teaching by lecture and discussion. The subjects were 126 community college students enrolled in remedial English classes. Two instructors…

This book represents, in part, the written record of the "Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages: Application of Generative Grammar to Their Description and Teaching," held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in February 1971. The aim of the Symposium was to bring forth contributions in the description of Romance languages, to draw…

The project purpose was to develop and field test a program of instruction for young deaf children which could be used in existing classrooms. The main program contained two areas of instruction in written language: verb vocabulary at a high level of generalization and sentence structure. The program materials were field tested with 78 children in…

This study--a follow-up to one conducted by Giles in 1965-- compared the written compositions of fourth grade pupils who had been in Project Head Start in the summer of 1965 with those of comparable pupils not in the program to determine possible differences in their written language development. Seventy Negro students were divided by sex and…

The syntactic properties of the child's language are studied. Within the framework of transformational grammar, the rules of syntax can be divided into three types: base- or phrase-structure rules, transformational rules, and morphological rules. Each of these rules is discussed. It is stated that the one process that appears to characterize each…

Examines the narrations of several students of one event in order to analyze factors such as suprasegmentals, use of determiners, and verb forms, which contribute to cohesion and coherence in oral narration. (AM)

Sample sentence-combining lessons developed to accompany the first-year A-LM German textbook are presented. The exercises are designed for language manipulation practice; they involve breaking down more complex sentences into simpler sentences and the subsequent recombination into complex sentences. All language skills, and particularly writing,…

Indicates that, in relation to oral systems, written systems are more complex in structure, reveal more adjectival but less adverbial elaboration, show more complex verbal structures, and contain fewer indices of personal reference. (RL)

Russian word order is varied to suit the communicative requirements of the speaker. The present study tests the hypothesis that American students of Russian use word order differently from native speakers, using the same order for different communicative tasks. Study results support the hypothesis. (CHK)

Responds to criticism of an earlier (1984) paper in which it was argued that the complements of Welsh control and raising verbs should be analyzed as verb phrases (VPs) and not as clauses with empty subjects. The l984 position is defended against the traditional analysis in the three critiqued areas.

Discusses the treatment of Chinese word order in major theoretical works, reference grammars, and textbooks. Guidelines for teachers to give first year students include: 1)predominant Chinese word order is SVO; 2) SOV and OSV word orders are permissible but used for contrastive purposes; and 3) only certain forms are permissible for SOV and OSV.…

Attempts to distinguish the role of the structure of a message in determining the different modalities of decodification and memorization in oral discourse based on the theories and experiments of Ragnar Rommetveit of the Oslo School. (CFM)