The use of discussion about students' vacations on the first day of a third-year college level conversational German class is analyzed. The discussion imitates a common conversational situation. Many students at this level tend to fall into use of the present tense, attempting few other tenses at first, and research shows that Germans consider…

Three sets of experiments compared skilled and unskilled college and school age (sixth through eighth grade) readers' processing of spoken and printed sentences in isolation and in story context. The two types of readers differed in their processing of the structural, thematic, and schematic properties of sentences in both reading and listening.…

Designed for use with 38 full-color slides and a cassette tape presentation, this instructional package consists of an instructor's guide and a student activity packet. The instructor's guide includes general instructions for presenting the instructional unit as well as specific instructions for introducing, implementing, and evaluating student…

Developed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, this booklet contains the competencies, item specifications, and sample items for the language arts competency tests for grades three, seven, and ten. Each competency statement contains a brief description, sample items, content, question form, and response form. The booklet also offers…

Two studies of concept development and categorization among 1-, 2-, and 3-year-old children suggest that concept formation is a socially guided process involving convergence on an adult model. Convergence in labeling is an early strategy for shaping children's category boundaries, while later, more elaborate linguistic means are used to…

A study of the information gained by students in the process of taking a cloze test in English as a second language was conducted with 34 full-time undergraduate foreign students at a state university. The subjects came from a variety of native language backgrounds. A 35-item cloze test was developed in which every eighth word was deleted,…

Error pattern analysis is a teaching technique that emphasizes identifying, classifying, and keeping a frequency count on only those errors actually occurring in students' writing. Application of error pattern analysis in a workshop format requires three steps: preparing an error pattern analysis, teaching from this analysis, and integrating it…

A volume combining two special issues of "Papers in Linguistics" contains 10 papers concerning Japanese language use and 12 concerning languages of the U.S.S.R. The papers on Japanese include: "Intrusion in Japanese Conversation,""Japanese Use of English Loans,""Some Discourse Principles and Lengthy Sentences in…

This study examined the effects of children's cognitively based role expectations on their judgments of the grammatical acceptability of sentences. Sixty children, 12 each in grades 4 through 8, individually heard 10 sentences violating the Minimum Distance Principle (MDP). The sentences were grammatical, but linguistically complex, and violated…

This issue of a publication devoted to providing ideas and guidance for teachers of English as a second language includes the following articles and features: (1) "Toward Interactive Modes in Guided Composition," (2) "Computer Compatibility in the Classroom," (3) "Discourse Structure in Reading," (4) "Terminal Behavior and Language," (5) "Sector…

Designed for the individualized instruction of non-mainstream (non-standard) dialect bearing students from middle school through secondary, this instructional packet attempts to develop flexibility in language whereby the dialect bearer will be able to assimilate the mainstream (standard) forms and phonology into his own idiolect without…

A study was conducted to determine whether a significant correlation existed between an essay's letter grade and five important factors of syntactic maturity (clause length, t-unit length, sentence length, clauses per t-unit, and t-units per sentence). A total of 45 essays--15 A, 15 B, and 15 C papers as graded by five junior college English…

Developmental data from the acquisition of English by a German child, aged 5, are analyzed with a view to identifying structural conditions that give rise to interference, and to determine which L2 structures are affected and which structures govern developmental changes. Word order in German and English sentences ahve reflexes in different…

The Spanish tense system was chosen as a starting point to establish the systematic character of the Spanish used in situations of intense code switching between Spanish and English. The tense system was chosen for two reasons: (1) the distinction among past tenses (in particular, the imperfect indicative vs. the preterite and the past continuous)…

Offered as a guide to teachers of basic writers (remedial or developmental students), this book contains activities for setting and achieving goals, for motivating reluctant beginning writers, and for practicing, stretching, and mastering basic writing skills. The six chapters of the book present ways of approaching rhetorical strategies and…