Reflecting the views of teachers, reading specialists, and professors on both the basics and the new technologies in reading instruction, these conference proceedings begin with Carl Personke's address, "The Word's the Thing," on classroom activities that stress the word as concept. The second paper, William Linville's and David…

Papers on child language development include: "Sentence Frame Effects on Children's Category Judgments" (Alison K. Adams); "Color Similarity in Children's Classifications and Extension of Object Labels" (Dare Baldwin); "Situational Properties of Early Verb Meaning" (Pol Cuvelier); "Similarity, Specificity, and…

The Center for Applied Linguistics, in Cooperation with Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, undertook to cover experimentally, for a period of 18 months, foreign language Journal material on applied linguistics published in Central and Eastern Europe and to select for abstracting, and in some cases, translation, articles of particular…

Recent evaluations of the influence of linguistics on language teaching indicate that there is a growing gulf between the two fields. Linguistics failed to provide a sound theoretical foundation for language teaching; it did not alter the content of language teaching, nor did it successfully modify the attitudes of teachers. The parameters of the…

This report is a cross-linguistic study that compares the sequence of emergence of semantic relations in English with the sequence of emergence of these relations in the acquisition of American Sign Language. American Sign Language (ASL) differs from English in modality (it is a visual-gesture language rather than an auditory-vocal one) and in the…

A five-point school subjects attitude scale, based on the semantic differential technique, was developed after two rounds of factor analysis; it contained 24 bipolar adjectives, each representing one of three factors: evaluation, usefulness, and difficulty. The scale was administered to Alberta (Canada) students in grades 5 and 8, who were…

The rise of American English as the medium for exhange of scientific and technical information worldwide is a linguistic phenomenon. For some time, applied linguists in Britain have provided texts to meet the demand for English for special purposes and English for science and technology. Their works use a British form of language and cover British…

Recognizing that the emotional state of the student is integral to his ability to learn, educators now place emphasis on testing in the affective domain. With this increasing demand for test data, ethical considerations must be taken into account as measurement instruments are designed, administered, and interpreted. Difficulties in instrument…

This paper is an attempt to show what parameters come into play when dealing with the problem of difficulty in foreign language learning. After subjecting the hierarchy of difficulty set up by R.P. Stockwell and J.D. Bowen to a critical examination, the author discusses various parameters such as individual and national difficulties, the…

This is a collection of comments and research on the problems of students studying at the tertiary level through the medium of a second language. It includes sections on vacabulary, reading skills, syntax, and speech. It also contains several studies of actual students and conditions at the University of Papua and New Guinea. (HW)

Previous research has shown that both vocal and visual cues are utilized in stereotyping and that teachers' stereotypes of students' ethnic and social class backgrounds affect both their expectations and evaluations of them. This study offers evidence toward the following questions: (1) do teachers evaluate students differently according to mode…

Examing the relationship between linguistic functions and other complex mental and emotional processes such as intellect, conceptual behavior, personality differences, egocentricity, and other important facets of cognitive and affective behavior may lead to the description of "psychologically" real grammatical structures which relate directly to…

Forty-five papers on linguistic theory and language research from the annual conference address these topics: aspects of discourse analysis; agreement languages; grammatical relations; syntax; phonology; grammar; contrastive linguistics; second language learning; syntax; quotations; topic management; aphasia; interpersonal communication; laughter;…

Examined six aspects of vocabulary instruction given to fourth and sixth graders prior to reading in two basal reading series. Found that words targeted for instruction were already known; instruction in the two series differed markedly; much of the instruction was not sufficient to improve comprehension; and instruction was not necessarily suited…

This paper reports the results of a University of Canberra Library survey of student research knowledge, skills, tools and resources. Students are experiencing difficulties interrogating databases, the internet and library catalogues because of the lack of consistency in terminology and various methods of interrogation. This research was an…