Gives practical suggestions for grading of tests so students are treated fairly and so that test results reflect goals of course. Criteria are validity and reliability. Grades should be established before grading begins. (Author/BK)

Suggests small group techniques that maximize classroom opportunities for student activity, and describes some oral and written tasks that have proved highly effective. Explains how group dynamics can offer support to students and help them break down some of their inhibitions about speaking a foreign language. (MES)

Describes ERIC resources that present research on children's language usage and development and that suggest activities for the promotion of language development. (ET)

Outlines teaching strategies developed in an inservice program for elementary teachers in rural areas of Bolivia; notes the importance of developing children's oral language skills, using the local environment as the basis for language experience lessons, and including community study in the curriculum. Presents ideas useful to teachers in other…

Considers school writing situations in comparison with speech situations. Discusses the responses of five Australian high school girls to questions about writing v speaking. (RL)

Describes the development of an instrument that identifies what children who are just beginning first grade reading instruction know about the written language code and relates this knowledge to beginning reading achievement. (HOD)

Examines phonological transfer in developmental student writing (spelling or word configurations that represent what the writer hears). Examines two discourse features--"by strings" and "topic/comment" sentence structures. Analyzes a developmental writing African American student's essay, demonstrating the power and tension in…

Discusses a study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Findings indicate the presence of disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in the corpus of recorded speech data. It is concluded that speech is not overly laden with errors, and there is nothing in the data to mislead the language…

Reports on a small-scale study of recasts--a form of corrective feedback. Subjects were eight adult second language learners (L2) of English. Data consisted of oral and written narratives primed by cartoon series and produced by both subjects in both groups. Recasts were found to be successful because they heightened the L2 learners awareness and…

Uses a corpus of spoken English from an Irish university setting to examine how engaged listenership is signaled in meetings between tutors and graduate students. Three strategies examined include minimal response tokens, non-minimal tokens, and simultaneous speech and interruptions. These were found to differ quantitatively and functionally and…

Compares strategies for conjunction in spoken English and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing. The article illustrates how ESL writers use "because" clauses to indicate the knowledge base for their assertions, to introduce independent segments, and to display links between sections of discourse. (44 references) (Author/CK)

Focuses on five fifth-grade students for whom student-led literature discussion was not working. Tells what happened when all five of the students were put in one group, and shows that students who seemed to be resistant eventually engaged themselves with the books they were reading. (SR)

A study of 141 children (ages 4-5) with language impairments and a study of 120 children (ages 7-12) with oral language and/or reading problems, indicate a relationship between the processing of phonological and semantactic linguistic information and performance on oral language and reading tests three years later. (Author/CR)

Examines a pattern of end-of-word deletion in Faetar, a Francoprovencal dialect spoken in southern Italy, and considers synchronic variants. The article uses the word "deletion" as a synchronic description of the fact that speakers do not always phonetically produce everything in the input form. Optimality Theory accounts for such…

Investigates potential problems with training native speaker interlocutors to carry out a series of oral interactions with a candidate for overseas employment with the Australian government. Findings reveal the effects of interlocutor variables and audiotape quality on ratings. Evaluates the overall feasibility of the procedure and examines…