This booklet provides guidelines to produce effective, responsive business letter writing, which promotes public relations, gives plain answers to questions, clearly states requests for additional information, and increases office efficiency and economy. Four major characteristics of such letters are discussed: (1) brevity and the avoidance of…

Reasons for the literacy problem on college and university campuses and the role of higher education in confronting this problem are discussed. Many young people today lack English skills necessary for holding a job, and students entering college are deficient in basic language skills. Some educators feel that college admission standards should be…

Measuring student writing skills can be done holistically, by ranking compositions without enumerating their linguistic, rhetorical, or information features, or atomistically, by viewing compositions as collections of these features. A variety of holistic approaches, including primary score testing, exist. Though their reliability has been…

The Environmental Education/Communication Skills program was designed to improve junior high school students' reading and writing skills. The key idea of the program was to motivate reading and writing improvement through environmental topic learning. Content focus areas were: orienteering, plant life, animal life, environmental problems, and…

Language development, including literacy learning (reading and writing) was studied in a first grade classroom in a culture-in-contact situation. The language behavior of three boys--one mainstream culture member, another from black inner-city culture, and a third from Appalachian culture--and the language of a teacher from mainstream culture were…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the adolescent writer's developing sense of audience; (2) the entry skills, methods, and attitudes of intermediate composition students in postsecondary composition programs; (3)…

The Skills Achievement Monitoring (SAM) program, developed by teachers and administrators in the public schools of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, is described. The program, used in writing and mathematics, is based on three assumptions: (1) that classroom teachers are the primary untapped resource in schools, (2) that tests of any kind must be used as…

THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES INHERENT IN CURRENT METHODS OF MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHING ARE DISCUSSED AT LENGTH, WITH EMPHASIS ON THE IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY DERIVED FROM THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE. THE IMPACT OF PHILOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES OF "EXOTIC LANGUAGES" ON TRADITIONAL GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY IS HIGHLIGHTED IN THE…

THESE PAPERS WERE PRESENTED AT THE 1966 ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR FOREIGN STUDENT AFFAIRS IN CHICAGO AT SECTION MEETINGS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE. SUBJECTS (AND AUTHORS) OF PAPERS PRESENTED ARE AS FOLLOWS--CURRICULUM PATTERNS (M. FINNOCHIARO), TEACHER PREPARATION (S. OHANNESSIAN), ASIAN…

AN INVESTIGATION WAS UNDERTAKEN TO DETERMINE WHETHER EARLY MANUAL COMMUNICATION WITH DEAF CHILDREN INFLUENCES THEIR SUBSEQUENT ACQUISITION OF (1) INTELLIGIBLE SPEECH, (2) READING ABILITY, (3) SPEECH READING ABILITY, (4) WRITTEN LANGUAGE, AND (5) PSYCHOSOCIAL ADJUSTMENT. THE DESIGN INVOLVED MATCHED PAIRS OF SUBJECTS BECAUSE OF THE LARGE NUMBER OF…

THE PROBLEMS EXAMINED IN THIS STUDY WERE (1) THE RELATIONSHIP OF PERCEPTION OF WORD ELEMENTS TO SIGHT VOCABULARY GROWTH, (2) THE EFFECT OF EARLY TEACHING OF A SPEECH-BASED PHONICS PROGRAM ON READING ACHIEVEMENT, AND (3) THE VALUE OF WRITING EMPHASIS IN THE SPEECH-BASED PHONICS PROGRAM. THREE READING PROGRAMS WERE INCLUDED IN THE STUDY, EACH USED…

A nine-week course was developed to teach philosophy in its literary contexts while developing students' verbal skills and independent learning abilities. The teaching guide, which emphasizes individualized instruction, contains a general course outline, memoranda for students and teachers concerning the nature of the course, and an outline of…

A study was conducted to describe the ability of students to handle the various systems of the English language (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) and to determine how these systems are being affected by the linguistic environments surrounding the students. The 210 student subjects were enrolled in seven of the schools of the Lake and…

Although the diagnostic testing of writing is still quite primitive, error analysis and protocol analysis hold promise for writing diagnosis. True diagnostic testing does more than aid in placing students; it identifies the nature of needed instruction. Tests in writing have not been developed to reflect approaches used in diagnostic testing in…

The Bullock Report, published in 1975, described English teaching practices in England and offered recommendations for improving those practices. This paper examines the background of the report and discusses topics in the report that are of particular interest to Americans, including the setting and monitoring of reading and writing standards,…