A study was conducted to describe the ability of students to handle the various systems of the English language (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) and to determine how these systems are being affected by the linguistic environments surrounding the students. The 210 student subjects were enrolled in seven of the schools of the Lake and…

A cross-cultural study of British and United States elementary school children's writing and reading, looking in particular at the comparative growth of syntactic maturity in the two countries as the key to both processes and the link between them, is described in this report. Five hundred sixteen children in 19 classrooms in the Nottingham area…

The need for an index of development by which second language proficiency could be expediently and reliably guaged has been acknowledged by both second language (L2) teachers and researchers. In two previous L2 studies, the search for an index of development centered on an examination of learner written performance. In an attempt to construct an…

An introduction to this teaching guide briefly explains the underlying theory of language, identifies behavioral objectives, and offers taxonomies of the four language skills. The major portion of the guide is composed of transcripts of Spanish listening comprehension tests. The tests are designed for use with audiolingual materials (ALM) and…

An overview of language concepts suggests applications of linguistics to the teaching of English at all levels of instruction. Traditional grammar, with its emphasis on syntax and written language, is discussed and then compared to generative grammar, with its emphasis on transformational theory. A discussion of usage summarizes the changes in…

Telephone interviews designed to elicit open-ended responses from disadvantaged kindergarten children were taped, analyzed, and scored to test the reliability of this interview technique in obtaining representative speech samples. To determine the effect of familiarity with telephones, one group of 12 children was provided with telephones in the…

This book is meant to serve as a guide to more efficient language teaching. Although it is based on theories both from standard audiolingual theory and cognitive-code learning, the basic objectives remain those of the audiolingual approach. The book focusses on the teaching of grammar and on the most efficient way to use drills in the classroom in…

In the first section a sketch of a tense logic is presented and a mechanism is suggested for including aspects of the tense logic into the Grammar (theory of language). Specifically, several grammatical structures are shown to incorporate temporal features. A semantic projection mechanism is utilized to amalgamate the temporal features in elements…

The relationship between developing oral language skills and reading skills was examined in a study involving 65 fifth and sixth grade children. The subjects' reading ability was tested on the comprehension and accuracy scales of a standardized reading test. The oral language measure was a recall task for verbal material of varying linguistic…

This is the first of a series of three volumes containing papers from a bilingual symposium held in 1975. Presentations and discussion at the symposium dealt primarily with suggestions for research which linguists should undertake to assist bilingual programs. This volume contains the following papers: "Developmental Psycholinguistics," by Deborah…

The development of a method for teaching oral comprehension in a second language depends on an understanding of the nature of comprehension and on an analysis of the problems that arise in the learning process. These issues can be approached by a theoretical investigation of comprehension from a psycholinguistic point of view and by the…

Up to the present, the Centre de Recherches et d'Applications Pedagogiques en Langues has approached the development of reading comprehension skills in English as a second language in terms of morpho-syntactic development. This article proposes to examine difficulties in reading comprehension based not on morpho-syntax but on the textual and…

The contrast between written language and oral language did not really begin to attract attention until second language teaching defined as its goal the acquisition of a communicative tool rather than a literary tool. This focus on communication made necessary the distinction between language used for oral communication and language used for…

This is a study of linguistic variability among social levels in West Germany and of the problems associated with doing such an analysis. The data, ordered according to sex and social levels, were collected from young children retelling narratives heard on tapes. The report represents a comprehensive study of the children's syntactic performance…

The purpose of this paper is to present a general overview of the linguistic setting of Arabic. Three main areas are covered. The first of these, diglossia, is defined in general terms and then examined more closely in relation to its historical development in Arabic-speaking countries (i.e., as resulting from geographic, socioeconomic, and…