This critical examination of the condition of the English language used in Britian today raises questions about the language with which society expresses its concerns. It analyzes the language used in contemporary England for religion, politics, serious journalism, love, and literature. Included is an account of the committee-language of the New…

The first of two experiments conducted in Detroit investigated the relationship between class and ethnic membership and identification of class and ethnicity; the role age and sex of respondent play in accuracy of speaker identification; and attitudes toward various socioethnic speech patterns. The second study was concerned with the attitudes of…

This instrument was developed for use with parents of children participating in bilingual education programs. It seeks to determine parental attitudes toward education in general and toward using both Spanish and English to teach courses in public schools. Statements requiring parental agreement or disagreement appear in both Spanish and English.…

Three examples from the colonial era show the different ways and purposes of learning Indian languages. It is described how this knowledge served both sides in the Revolution, and imporved communication during peacetime. (MS)

Discusses changes in language contacts that are evolving in Quebec between the minority Anglophones and the French-speaking majority. Census data analyses and field research studies indicate that the pattern of language usage among Anglophones is altering in favor of French, indicating capabilities for and attitudes toward greater participation…

Assessment of private funding for university research reveals much ambiguity concerning the public or private status of Crown corporation funding. Quebec data show the drop in corporate funding is due to decreased public and parapublic assistance and that university-industry ties are closely related to institutional language (French or English).…

American higher education should have three priorities: (1) show students that we are connected through the use of symbols; (2) help students understand, through science, the underlying patterns and connections of the natural world; and (3) teach students about social and civic institutions through familiarity with other cultures. (MSE)

Presents a series of 10 true-false statements pertaining to dialect, then discusses the correct answers. (FL)

The Icelandic language has a long and stable history, and Old Icelandic is still accessible to modern day Icelanders. This is despite being ruled from Denmark, with influence by the Danish language, for about 500 years. Icelandic may now be under a more serious threat from the onslaught of English. This paper evaluates the linguistic situation in…

This paper discusses the relationship between mother tongue, foreign language, and thinking. It is based on a pilot study carried out with 30 Finnish university students majoring in English philology. All students filled in a questionnaire and four were selected for an interview. In the questionnaires and interviews, the students were asked to…

Teaching medical English presupposes knowledge about its vocabulary composition. the role of Latin (and also Greek) elements in the vocabulary can be shown through statistical methods. English medical vocabulary appears to contain two kinds of Latin vocabulary elements: words of Latin origin in the general vocabulary of English and words and terms…

A native English-speaker explores the reasons why she persists in speaking her husband's native language, Chinese, at an intermediate level at home, despite the fact that she lives in the United States. She looks, in a humorous way, at the errors she has made in learning Chinese, some cultural contexts for language choice, the importance of…

Significant because of deliberate attempts to manipulate the use of two languages in the instructional process, the role of language in the bilingual classroom has been studied from four main points of veiw, each of which is examined in terms of implications for bilingual education. (SB)

Speculates on how central concepts in Basil Bernstein's work can, with some revision, yield a descriptive-analytic framework for the study of communicative competence, particularly in its developmental sense. (PD)

Examines effects of several lexical and sublexical variables (lexical category and frequency, syllabic structure, word length) in reading acquisition in a transparent language--Spanish. Compares effects of variables in 140 normal and poor young readers. Finds that all variables produced a significant effect on the number of errors made by the…