This study investigates plural noun forms in Modern Hebrew to show that the pattern of regularization differs for specific words, rather than for classes of words. Early regularization, in which the children add a plural suffix with no stem change, applies unconditionally. Subsequently, the pattern changes and while some words are still…

This discussion is intended as a general introduction to communicative language teaching. The text is divided into six parts dealing with the reasons for communicative language teaching, the background to it, learning to communicate, classroom activities, the role of the teacher, and ways to get the method started. Part One examines the nature of…

Recognizing that school personnel serving limited English proficient students would benefit from objective and valid measures of language assessment, a study viewed the oral language performance of second language learners of English between the ages of six and eight in order to chart the development of selected syntactic structures in their…

Because of the syntactic differences between Spanish and Quechua, Quechua-speaking children must make major word order adjustments to learn the Peruvian Spanish taught in school. This study investigates whether the order or time sequence in which these changes are adopted reflects any general constraint, or is in any way predicted by a theory of…

This paper examines three policy areas -- foreign language and international studies, bilingual education, and Indian education. The intention is to clarify and critically analyze the influence of educational policy on language issues. If both foreign language/international studies and bilingual education were incorporated into a larger language…

Two children's spontaneous utterances containing the comparative structure are examined for their semantic content. Many comparatives are found to encode the notion "A has property X," and this use is often found in reference to the presence of X to an extreme, rather than a non-extreme, extent. The uses of the comparative are analyzed…

A delay in the acquisition of morphology by a two-year-old Estonian-speaking boy was investigated to determine the role the child's bilingualism (with English) played in the delay. In contrast to his older sister, whose exposure to English was delayed, the boy exhibited a "whole word" approach to morphology, characterized by the following: (1)…

This is a presentation of the Slovene language, one of the three official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the official or administrative language of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. The presentation covers the following topics: (1) description of the language, the speech area, and contemporary standard Slovene; (2)…

Two issues in language development are explored--the emergence of the ability to communicate and the relationship between emerging forms and functions. Solutions to these problems involve the notion of interpretation and depend on the fact that adults interpret children's behaviors as if they were meaningful according to the adult system. The…

Research has shown student field-independent cognitive style (FI), as opposed to field-dependent cognitive style (FD), to be correlated moderately with success on selected second language tasks. A trait-treatment interaction approach was utilized in this study to examine the role of FD/I among 236 college students enrolled in six sections of an…

This dictionary contains lists of nouns in the Holikachuk Athabaskan language as spoken by about twenty people, most of whom live in the village of Grayling, Alaska. The Holikachuk alphabet and sound system are presented. The nouns with English equivalents are listed according to the following categories: animals, fish, insects, birds, plants,…

Discourse analysis, a field that reflects an interest in language as text and social interaction, is discussed. Discourse analysis deals with the way language varies from one communicative situation to another; textological analysis deals with the internal organization of such discourse in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Assumptions in…

A practical orthography is presented for Kuuk Thaayorre, which is spoken by over 300 Aborigines in Australia. The phonemes in Thaayorre and the way they are symbolized in normal writing practice are presented. Frequent occurrence of six conventional digraphs for some Thaayorre consonants has given rise to complementary orthography as an initial…

Three studies tested the ability of children of different ages to comprehend spoken sentences while viewing pictures that differed from the sentences according to some plausible combinations of actor, action, and beneficiary. In the first two studies, involving a total of 140 subjects, nine contextual conditions were used, including sentence only,…

In a small informal study of the process of children's writing, three children, aged 9, 10, and 11, were observed as they wrote. Specifically, the study sought to discover how the children approached the task of writing, the manner and extent of their interaction, and the result of this interaction upon their writing. Each child's writing was also…