A sample of 412 secondary school English teachers from 42 schools participated in a study of the effect of selected mechanical errors on teachers' evaluations of nonmechanical aspects of students' writing. Three revised versions of a student's paragraph were prepared: in the first, all mechanical errors were removed; in the second, the student's…

This bibliography cites books and articles relevant to the topic of English as a world language. Entries include both American and European publications, and most have been published since 1965. (CLK)

A structured elicitation technique, convergent communication, was investigated as a means of constraining the range of linguistic data from children in K-3 without unduly constraining the naturalness of the conversation context. The convergent communication situation is a two-person problem-solving task which ensures that all communication is…

The Word Meaning section of the Metropolitan Readiness Test, Form A, was questioned as a true measure of the capabilities of culturally disadvantaged children. Therefore, an attempt was made to compare the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test with a test in which as many objects as possible were renamed to coincide with the language of the students…

The purposes of this study were to investigate whether a listening improvement program developed for business and industry would be successful in improving the listening skills of college students and whether a listening improvement program designed primarily for speakers of standard English would be successful with speakers of nonstandard…

This paper reports on a preliminary quantitative study of syntactic constraints on code-switching within discourses in which no change in participants, setting or topic is evident. The goals of the study are to provide a syntactic description of the points at which switches from Spanish to English and English to Spanish are possible and to assess…

This is a study of tense variation in "si"-clauses in Buenos Aires Spanish which basically consists of the substitution of the conditional for the imperfect subjunctive. The highest frequency of imperfect subjunctive shows up in +Contrary examples, while the conditional substitutes much more often in -Contrary examples. When the…

Recent analyses of Russian (Halle 1963, Lightner 1972) have been forced by the criteria of rule "naturalness" and rule "generality" to posit highly abstract underlying forms. These underlying forms and rules are claimed to represent the speaker's competence. Such analyses are now being criticized (Derwing 1973, Hooper 1974) on the following…

This paper argues that it may be much more damaging, psychologically, to try to correct the written usage of persons whose nonstandard written forms correlate with their spoken dialect than to try to correct the nonstandard written forms of persons who do not use nonstandard forms in their speech. It is possible that nonstandard speakers will view…

This paper suggests that the main reason for the failure of many children to learn to read may be that reading programs often require the child to begin reading before he has developed oral language skills. By 3 years of age the child has acquired almost all the linguistic rules needed to produce basic, or kernel, sentences, which consist of…

The great variety of language differences in South Carolina has created some problems which this program, developed by the South Carolina State Department of Education, aims to overcome. The present package of materials was designed to provide the elementary teacher of grades 1, 2, and 3 with a general background of information and a specific…

Development of this 6-part inservice program making major use of programed instruction began in 1969 with the objective of modifying classroom teacher behavior in the direction of individualizing the instruction of students learning to control standard English. A review of literature on dialects gave some guidance toward determining the…

A collection of 20 sample units for use in implementing an effective ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) program. The collection includes units for the first through sixth grade in science, arithmetic, spelling, social studies, and language. Throughout these units special emphasis is placed on using linguistics and adapting oral-aural…

The papers in this booklet both share a growing concern that every aspect of reading instruction should make sense to the learner and focus attention on the way in which children comprehend what is required of them. The papers include "Effective Teachers of Reading Know Language and Children"; "ERIC/RCS Report: Jean's Influence on Dick and Jane,"…

This paper discusses college admissions tests and their tendency to discriminate against blacks and Chicanos. Evidence to support this thesis is presented from two perspectives--the level of reading difficulty of the tests and the restricted dialectal characteristic of the language used in the tests. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)-Verbal…