Although content related questions may indicate the depth of a readers' understanding of a passage, they do not necessarily help readers develop more general strategies for extracting information from print. A program of strategies to develop comprephension skills should include prereading instruction, activities that increase awareness of written…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) stop/fricative variation; (2) the acquisition of relational comparatives; (3) teachers' turn taking sanctions in primary school lessons; (4) hearing as an age…

Examination of business letters in English, French, and Japanese, focusing on prescriptive accounts in the respective languages, found that, despite amazingly similar surface characteristics, American business letters were reader-oriented, French business letters were writer-oriented, and Japanese business letters were oriented to the space…

Describes a technique called "vowel-sound-stick" which uses students' limited abilities in phonics, with an emphasis placed on syllabication in order to give the remedial reader a simple method of word attack. (RS)

A review of the origin of surnames in China covers such areas as number of surnames, selection of surnames, and surnames in national minorities. (CB)

The linguistic complexity of humor is illustrated with examples of word play translated from French to English and English to French. Examples from the writings of James Joyce and Marcel Proust are highlighted. (CB)

Discusses and compares the syntactic features of free relative clauses found in Castilian and Aragonese dialects of Old Spanish. The role of clitics (nontonic pronominals) and the lexical innovations of the wh-question compound-type clauses are highlighted. (TR)

Used experimental tasks--spontaneous telling of a story, reading, and parsing--to determine whether empirical data reflect narrative structure of stories. It was concluded that spontaneous pausing reflects the narrative structure and can be used as a guide to constructing theories of narrative structure and deciding between competing theories.…

Alaska native children tend toward academic difficulties due to the mismatch between school curricula and their linguistic and culturally-based cognitive skills. Data derived from a rigorous linguistic approach, which analyzes their actual speech to identify cognitive abilities, would assist researchers and curriculum designers improve school…

Presents the historical, technological, and pedagogical factors that led to high expectations in the use of language laboratories for teaching foreign languages. Presents findings of five studies on laboratory effectiveness showing that efficiency tests were largely irrelevant and inconclusive. Includes 10 proposals for language laboratory use.…

Examines the implications of structuralism for reading and English instruction. Argues that, according to Structuralism, literature worth reading confronts readers with the gap between writing and thought and forces them to consider their own thinking and, in a larger sense, their own place within the culture. (MM)

This paper presents an introduction to language engineering software, especially for computerized language and text corpora. The focus of the paper is on small and relatively independent pieces of software designed for specific, often low-level language analysis tasks, and on tools in the public domain. Discussion begins with the application of…

This paper describes a computerized system for tagging language corpora that accommodates the special conditions in Bulgarian language research (notably, lack of advanced technology and corresponding user knowledge). SUPERLINGUA has been developed in the DOS environment with consideration for these conditions. Information on product use, users,…

The Bella Coola suffix "-m" has been analyzed in the literature as two or even three separate morphemes, based on the variable effects it has on the transitivity of its base. The segment is argued for here as a single morpheme with a unified meaning, specifically as a marker of a special case of one definition of the middle voice,…

Discusses some syntactic evidence gathered in a recent study which suggests not only that the dialect of Puerto Rican Spanish spoken in the New York area may be undergoing greater change than has previously been documented, but also that English interference cannot adequately account for the nature of that change. (EKN)