For newly independent Central Asian republics a debate has arisen about how much of the aims, content and pedagogy of old Soviet-era curricula to retain, how much to revise or replace, and with what. There is a need to replace and revise textbooks, which are wearing out and outdated. Financial crisis has made the financial support of external…

Development and use of an English for Special Purposes (ESP) textbook for Turkish police dealing with tourists are described. The textbook and accompanying videotape (not available from ERIC) were designed for use in a course to improve job-specific communicative competence of police officers with a lower-intermediate to intermediate level of…

In an investigation of the characteristics of "considerate" text, defined as informative, content area text that promotes student comprehension, learning and remembering, this report presents a prototypical chapter of considerate text on American history following the Revolutionary War and a commentary on the writing. Beginning with the…

Several text format variables were examined in an attempt to identify the ways in which these variables interact in specific design combinations. The variables include: heading location (embedded or isolated); line length (short or long); space between lines (single or double); paragraph indication (indented or spaced); use of running heads…

Two studies investigated the differential effects of organizational cuing and strategy training on learning disabled (LD) adolescents, a group which, it has been suggested, is particularly insensitive to the effects of organizational cues. Participants for the first study included 37 LD and 50 nonhandicapped high school students who were randomly…

This study was undertaken to support the approach of teaching natural language and to illustrate what linguistic research can say to foreign language textbook developers and classroom teachers. The reality of oral conversational Spanish, as illustrated by research in language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics, is one in…

Sweden makes great effort to teach every citizen English. However, the simplistic views of language teaching which fad and folklore promote have made it difficult to achieve cumulative, verifiable improvements in teaching. This report briefly reviews previous systems of quantitative, partially automated analysis of language teaching materials…

Textbooks are an integral part of the educational process and are especially important in the Third World. However, the process of textbook development is particularly difficult in these regions because of problems associated with multinational publishing companies, copyright law, and difficulties in developing indigenous publishing industries in…

Textbook publishing has grown rapidly in developing nations, but publishing organizations in these countries have encountered problems as well as successes. Problems exist in assessing needs, in financing, developing, printing, and distributing the manuscripts, in manufacturing, and in purchasing policies. Successes in solving these problems are…

Asserts that decisions regarding textbook content China are political and determined by the central government. Reports on a study of 15 elementary and secondary geography textbooks published between 1948 and 1991. Finds that the image of the United States portrayed in these books has changed dramatically. (CFR)

Asserts that during the past two decades, the coverage of African Americans in college-level U.S. history textbooks has improved in both quantity and quality. Reports that, despite these advances, a survey of 14 textbooks revealed a significant portion of African American history remains beyond the boundaries of these texts. (ACM)

A computer curriculum guideline for Taiwan junior high schools was announced in 1994 and will be nationally implemented in 1998. Due to the specific educational system in Taiwan, the guideline will affect computer textbook writing, computer teaching and learning, computer teachers' professional development, and computer education research. This…

Summarized is a report by Jane Burnette titled "Adapting Instructional Materials for Mainstreamed Students," which describes federally sponsored projects to develop publishable supplements and adaptations of popular textbooks for use with mainstreamed handicapped students. The modifications were made to elementary curricula in science…

Pedagogical grammar is the presentation of grammatical information for teaching purposes. Two important distinctions are relevant here: reference books versus teaching grammars programmed into a course, and generalized versus specialized grammars, (depending on the extent to which they have been designed to meet specific teaching/learning…

This paper consists of three parts. Section 1 considers how difficult it is to analyze natural languages by computer, and, therefore how difficult it is to evaluate automatically the student's responses to some types of questions in computer-aided instruction systems for language teaching. Section 2 discusses drawbacks of conventional computer…