Though much time and energy are spent expanding foreign language programs, students are often unable to use a language in its environment. This article stresses the need for a sociolinguistic framework in foreign language teaching to correct this situation, suggesting ways to incorporate linguistic competence and performance awareness in language…

A study was conducted to determine whether the child expresses linguistic knowledge during the single-word period. The order of mention in 65 sets of successive single-word utterances from five children at Stage 1, two to four years old, were analyzed. To elicit speech, the children were shown line drawings representing such situations as animate…

The concept of a speech community is investigated within the theoretical frameworks of sociology and linguistics, and it is concluded that the collective competence models of Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky are inadequate. They fail in that they are limited as linguistic models which have consistently overlooked the sociological importance…

This paper is strongly critical of the transformational approach to language, which, according to the author, "has presented an essentially incorrect view of the nature of language by treating it as a self-contained system, independent of its use as a medium of human communication." Four aspects of transformational theory found to follow from the…

Fries' definition of knowing a language rejects the layman's notion that the criterion is knowing a certain number of words. It involves, rather, knowing a set of items--sound segments, sentence patterns, lexical items--which must be made a matter of automatic habit. Various approaches to testing someone's use of a language have failed to take…

In the last decade an unprecedented number of college-level foreign students have appeared in the United States, competing with native speakers in schools where the only medium of instruction is English. All students at American universities have to do three kinds of sophisticated writing--summarizing in notes, writing exam essays, and writing…

Having divided those aspects of linguistics which have direct concern with the teaching of reading into two general types--phonology and usage (content and structure)--it was stressed that a teacher can employ both, understanding that initial recognition of sound symbols is necessary and that the point of developing reading skill is to enable…

This study was designed to collect and analyze the verbal protocols of students involved in introspection as they responded to standardized measures of reading comprehension, for the purpose of learning more about the reading process. Eleven seventh grade students from an urban public school were randomly chosen from 61 subjects who met the…

In an effort to resolve some of the problems of widespread reading failure, this report investigated the way in which the language of inner-city black first graders corresponded to the language of beginning reading texts and whether or not dialect features occurred consistently in the children's speech. Twenty first grade black children were…

Since reading and language lie in the behavioral domain of the English teacher, he must be a teacher of reading and know how to perform the following five language tasks: (1) present the code-breaking skills needed to change written symbols into spoken language; (2) produce a wide variety of reading materials on useful topics and record and…

The central problem of the study was to determine the English competencies required of secretaries in the Medical, Legal and Administrative Secretarial Areas. The questionnaire/interview method was employed, utilizing 50 questionnaires and ten interviews in each of the three secretarial areas, and distributing them to imployers and employees…

Verbal responses of 50 college freshmen were compared to determine whether any differences existed between the types of responses given by students listed as high or low in verbal ability according to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The students, from two colleges, were tested individually using an experimenter-devised language inventory which…

Two curriculum strategies were implemented and assessed in an effort to increase the bidialectal proficiency of fifth grade speakers of nonstandard Negro dialect. It was hypothesized that (1) children exposed to the curriculum strategies will show increased proficiency in their use of standard English; (2) children thus exposed will maintain…