Assesses illiterate and semiliterate speakers of Serbo-Croatian on reading, writing, phonological, and control tasks. Three groups, categorized with respect to the subjects' ability to identify the letters of their Cyrillic alphabet, differed on phoneme deletion and phoneme-counting tasks, but not on syllable-counting, picture vocabulary, or…

Examines cognitive development in 141 children (ages 5 to 8) and the use of pragmatic cues for anaphora resolution performed in verbal and puppet tasks with biased and neutral sentences. Violations of pragmatic constraint decreased with age and task, consistent with the perspective-shift model. Parallel function effects in neutral sentences were…

Explored bilingualism between Jamaican patois and standard English to gain insight into the semantic lexicon and investigate if there is extinction, replacement, or extension of the patois meanings with the linguistically shared words, such as "salad," in 20 adults given 2 tasks to perform. Results suggest modification of the compound…

Provides an overview of cognitive task analysis-based instructional design (CTA-BID) and its applications in the design of instructional and testing materials for distance education. Reviews developments in education, psychology, and instructional design that complement CTA-BID. (Author/AEF)

The intuitions and reasoned judgments of second-language learners of English were compared on a number of semantic and syntactic phenomena in the language. Because scores on the semantic tasks were higher than on syntactic tasks, it is assumed that classroom instruction should follow the same route. (24 references) (Author/LB)

This paper investigates the development of interactive communication skills in 170 children aged 7 to 13. Results indicate that the development of interactive communication skills is rather different from the process of language acquisition both in the extended timescale involved and in the considerable variability exhibited by speakers of…

Garman (1974), reporting on 20 Tamil children aged 3 to 5, postulated a linguistic strategy and 2 prelinguistic strategies to explain results of a question-picture choice task involving sentences with embedded and subordinate clauses. Reanalysis of this data identifies four processing strategies and argues that certain grammatical sensitivities…

Storytelling scenarios are suggested for teaching basic first-aid skills to children (ages 4-9) who have mild to severe disabilities. The method involves four steps: assembling materials; identifying skills and conducting task analyses; teaching the skills; and assessing discrimination among different types of injuries, generalization to new…

This article presents procedures, forms, and instructional techniques used to increase achievement of learning-disabled students through measuring and controlling task difficulty during classroom instruction time. These techniques are especially recommended for classrooms using individualization and small group instruction. (Author/PB)

Investigates effect of task type on resultant candidate discourse and input of the interlocutor. The experimental design ensured an information gap in one of the interview tasks for prospective immigrants to Australia. Findings indicate that candidate discourse differs in quantity and quality between situations when an information gap exists and…

Describes principles underlying ILLICO, a generic natural-language software tool for building larger applications for performing specific linguistic tasks such as analysis, synthesis, and guided composition. Shows to what extent this approach is relevant to the development of computer-assisted language-learning systems. (Author/VWL)

This investigation encompassed a full-scale experiment for both Japanese and Korean university students and looked at the following: the role of grammaticality-judgment tasks (GJT) in second-language acquisition; the learners' behaviors when they were asked to do GJT; and the reasons why the learners made the wrong grammatical judgments.…

Uses results of case study of children using collaborative talk in text-based task to argue there is no clear distinction between what is "off" or "on" task talk. Based on Vygotsky's theory of social basis of thought, (it develops from internalism of speech and functions within various relationships), evidence shows children…

Examines a wide range of writing tasks of 11- and 15-year-old students from four regions of England to establish the relative importance of nonstandard dialect as a factor in deviation from standard English norms in writing. (Author/JL)

Reports the preliminary results of an ongoing study of the benefits of building repetition into a communicative task in an English for Specific Purposes course. Compares the performances of two learners at markedly different levels of English proficiency and finds that both benefited from the opportunity to recycle communicative content as they…