This curriculum guide for Indiana's Latin education programs is intended as a model for the integration of communicative, cultural, and linguistic learning in Latin curricula and instruction and an aid in designing proficiency-based curricula and instruction. It establishes the proficiency expected at the end of each of four instructional levels…

Development of oral foreign language proficiency in high school and college instruction is complemented by well-designed writing exercises integrating all skills and providing contact with various language forms. A series of short, text-adaptable, proficiency-based writing activities reinforcing aural, oral, and reading skills throughout the basic…

This study examined the possibility that aspiring parents' and teachers' recalled experience with elementary school subjects affects their academic expectations for young children. The recalled experience of 103 university students majoring in education was measured by questions that asked: (1) how difficult and interesting each subject was for…

A commonly accepted rule for developing equated examinations using the common-items non-equivalent groups (CINEG) design is that items common to the two examinations being equated should be identical. The CINEG design calls for two groups of examinees to respond to a set of common items that is included in two examinations. In practice, this rule…

An approach to second language teaching is proposed that integrates elements of the grammatical and functional-notional syllabus designs. The resulting combination is a communicative framework for functional practice in language learning and teaching. The current status of language teaching is examined in the context of these two instructional…

The comparative effectiveness of different types of instructors' notes provided during lectures of varying complexity was examined. Ninety-four undergraduates (sophomores and juniors) at a large Midwestern university were presented with 2 taped lectures, each about 60 minutes long. The first lecture was a fact-based description of instructional…

A study investigated the use of a collection of English language books by Doshisha University (Japan) students of English as a Second Language (n=300). Four levels of readers, graded by vocabulary content were used in eight classes that offered individualized reading instruction. Students were given instruction in using graded readers, strongly…

The results of classifying test items on the basis of their Mantel-Haenszel (MH) alpha estimates were compared to the results of classifying these items using an item response theory (IRT) based procedure involving the comparison of item difficulties in the interest of identifying the alpha value that maximized the decision concordance between the…

A procedure used to average several Mantel-Haenszel delta difference values for an item is described and evaluated. The differential item functioning (DIF) procedure used by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) is based on the Mantel-Haenszel statistical technique for studying matched groups. It is standard procedure at ETS to analyze test items…

Increasing emphasis is being given to the construct of course structure in educational research. The Course Structure Inventory (CSI) was designed to measure this construct as a unitary dimension made up of student attitudes toward varying degrees and kinds of structure (ACS). In addition to measuring ACS, the CSI has the added advantage of…

Factor analysis is the traditional method for studying the dimensionality of test data. However, under common conditions, the factor analysis of tetrachoric correlations does not recover the underlying structure of dichotomous data. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the factor analyses of tetrachoric correlations is unlikely to…

A readability formula for elementary Spanish instructional materials was developed by building on previous research, particularly in regard to the application of the Fry readability graph to Spanish language materials. The study began with the selection of average sentence length and number of syllables per 100 words as independent variables.…

One of a series dealing with current issues affecting language arts instruction, this paper focuses on the conceptions and misconceptions of readability. The paper begins by noting that over the years, researchers in readability have had two major goals: to determine what makes written materials easy or difficult to read and comprehend, and to…

The purpose of this investigation was to identify item factors that may contribute to differential item functioning (DIF) for black examinees on Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) analogy items. Initially, items were classified according to several possible explanatory factors. Preliminary analyses identified several factors that seemed to affect DIF…

How accurately deltas (statistics measuring the difficulty of items) established by pre-test populations reflect deltas obtained from final form populations, and the consequent utility of pre-test deltas for constructing final (operational test) forms to meet developed statistical specifications were studied. Data were examined from five subject…