Discusses the linguist's role in an adult education program and the need to define adult functional literacy. Describes communication problems with the many dialects and language variations in a multilingual country like India and explains that the linguist must help the literacy worker to integrate language and literacy with adult education. (MF)

Case studies examined impact of early intervention on the rate of acquisition of communicative and linguistic behaviors for a small group of severely and profoundly deaf infants. Found that infants who were diagnosed and used amplification by six months of age acquired vocal and linguistic skills at an age more comparable to hearing peers than did…

Describes attempts to formalize and characterize a theory of communicative competence, focusing on the advantages of a preference model (which identifies and grades learning variables in order of importance) and of models developed on the premise of parallel distributed processing (which suggest that such rule-based processing are in fact gross…

Examines the influence of conversational interaction on language change. Described two experiments that contrast language coordination between speakers who interacted with the same partner and speakers who interacted with different partners in a maze game context. Suggests that the experiments illustrate how a community affects language change as…

Investigated third and sixth graders' understanding of factive presupposition using two tasks: one requiring an abstract truth judgment of the verb complement, the other calling for informal judgment of consistency between the target sentence and the negation of its complement. Results indicated the development of factive presupposition is an…

Studied the dinner table conversations of 22 families with young children. Analyzed utterances for language-focused terms. Reported that metalinguistic uses exceeded pragmatic uses. Found that during routine social interactions, parents provide children with potentially important information about the communicative functions of language.…

Meaningfully integrating multidimensional approaches with learner-centered, workshop-style second language (L2) literature instruction at intermediate-level proficiency can help students increase their linguistic competence and further both their cultural understanding and analytical thinking skills. Moreover, the utilization of drama techniques…

This article focuses on some of the key issues that need to be addressed by 2010 if MLPS in England is going to work. The aims of MLPS need defining as educational, not instrumental; the KS1/2 experience has to be enjoyable and rewarding: an apprenticeship in learning how to learn a language, providing the tools for later learning and raising…

Although programs for teaching and testing of English as a second language (ESL) are often evaluated for their attention to communicative competence, there is no consensus on the nature of the communicative competence construct(s) and little empirical support for the various explanatory models. The theoretical literature related to communicative…

The notion that a set of restricted-generalized abilities underlies both reading and writing is explored in this essay. Following a definition of schooled language competence (SLC), the first section asserts that knowledge and problem solving are insufficient and nonlinguistic approaches to language competence. The second section focuses on…

An external evaluation of the Title VII Bilingual Education Program was designed to: (1) gather a subjective assessment from personnel working with the program; (2) observe classroom teaching and activities utilized in bilingual instruction; and (3) measure differences in levels of achievement. The instructional personnel appear to accept the…

Since there is a lack of studies that reveal school age children's oral competence in story production, a five-year longitudinal descriptive study was undertaken to determine a child's sense of story as revealed by children's oral generation of stories. The specific story elements analyzed were sources of their stories, narrative form, formal…

The purposes of this study were (1) to investigate changes in knowledge acquired by children between the ages of 8 and 17, with respect to certain complex word-derivation processes and (2) to investigate the relation of the changes in children's knowledge of word derivation to various aspects of their reading achievement. The study used ten words…

Imitation in the speech of the child serves at least three functions in the development of linguistic competence. Imitation provides auditory feedback for phonological and morpho-syntactic accuracy, produces a model for verification and/or clarification by speakers, and "makes time" for the processing and acquisition of information. Beyond these…

This paper examines the role of foreign language teaching in answering the external needs of students, including equipping the student with vocational or professional skills, and the internal needs, including the broadening of perception of self, society and culture. Communication in general and participation in society benefit from foreign…