Minority cultures develop homogeneous customs, language, and thought patterns that affect the writing of individuals from these cultures. Once a student moves outside this homogeneous environment--for example, from an ethnic ghetto to white, middle class classrooms--ideas that seem to the writer to relate clearly to one another do not seem logical…

The feasibility of standardized assessment of features of children's organization of knowledge and the demonstration of differences in organization between stages of development were investigated. It was possible to standardize developmentally derived instruments, in the same way as empirically derived tests because such evaluations concern the…

A longitudinal study of English acquisition by a Vietnamese mother and her daughter is reported. Subjects of this study are Lan, a young Vietnamese woman in her late twenties, and her daughter Than, who was four years old at the time this study began. Neither knew any English when they resettled in Texas in the summer of 1975 after fleeing from…

Play sessions of two Mexican children (one five and one eight years old) with English-speaking friends were recorded and the use of language play was examined. Language play is viewed as a non-literal, rule-bound use of language that children engage in for its own sake, either cooperatively or competitively. Practice opportunities and children's…

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 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…

A three-year study of the linguistic and metalinguistic performance of forty Mexican-American children ranging in age from three to eleven years shows that it is useful to characterize the competence of the bilingual in terms of a unified system of rules, at least at one level of analysis. This paper explores some aspects of the grammatical…

Addressed to teachers, educators, and other specialists in language learning, this volume sketches a pedagogical theory of discourse for a language arts curriculum (see "A Student-Centered Language Arts Curriculum, Grades K-13: A Handbook for Teachers," TE 001 468). The emphasis is upon mastering the art of communication through the everyday use…

An analysis was made of the strategies by which tutors adapt their teaching to individual students; the objective was to synthesize these strategies in a computer system called SCHOLAR. Tape recordings of dialogues between tutors and students about South American geography were made to discover the strategies used by tutors. Since SCHOLAR is a…

An investigation of instances of phonological contact between Hungarian and American English concerns the perception and production of English interdental fricatives and English stops, in a representative selection of contexts, by native speakers of Hungarian. Implications of structural differences between the stop and fricative subsystems of the…

Presents an experimental primary trait rubric designed to assess a writer's support for an argument, and structured as an eleven-cell grid on which a rater can plot a student's score. Describes the grid, and its use in a study of 1,892 eleventh-grade essays. Also describes ways to use the grid to teach invention and arrangement. (JG)

Examines American public discourse about civil rights in national magazines from 1939-1959, indicating three stages in the controversy: (1) a positive recharacterization of blacks, (2) an inclusion of blacks under the nation's ideographs, and (3) a final contest between segregationist and integrationist rhetorics. Discusses the potential for…

Offers 10 basic principles that express the beliefs of the deans of 12 Pennsylvania colleges about the nature of literature, how it is best studied, how it is best taught, and the relationship between writing and literature. (SRT)

The use of computerized concordances in second language teaching is discussed, drawing on the results of a study undertaken in a teaching seminar. In the study, a corpus of 401 English sentences from electronic mail (e-mail) texts written by American pupils to a German school were analyzed with an electronic concordancer and compared with 326…

This study analyzes the use and distribution patterns of the Discourse Marker (DM) "You Know" in interviews with members of a Hispanic folklore dance troupe. The study attempts to demonstrate how the use of this DM expresses identity among Hispanic females and if its use is affected by the ethnic labels each speaker uses. By assessing…