Current educational policies regarding equal educational opportunity are confused and often contradictory. There is no clear consensus as to what constitutes an equal opportunity. Most modern educators agree that the modern equal educational movement began in the 1950's with the Supreme Court decision in "Brown vs. the Board of…

This study examines the perception of paralinguistic intonational meanings deriving from Ohala's Frequency Code (Experiment 1) and Gussenhoven's Effort Code (Experiment 2) in British English and Dutch. Native speakers of British English and Dutch listened to a number of stimuli in their native language and judged each stimulus on four semantic…

Narratives produced by 69 healthy Italian adults were analyzed for age-related changes of microlinguistic, macrolinguistic and informative aspects. The participants were divided into five age groups (20-24, 25-39, 40-59, 60-74, 75-84). One single-picture stimulus and two cartoon sequences were used to elicit three stories per subject. Age-related…

The goal of this study was to analyze the development of the relationship between conceptual and linguistic processes as regards idea ordering and structuring (linearizing), when composing a text. Participants (from 7th graders to University students) were required to compose a text using a list of eleven scrambled ideas. Conceptual rules allow to…

This study gathered information regarding professional military educators' perceptions of the concept of critical thinking to determine whether there was a common definition and a shared meaning of the concept among them. Although there did not appear to be a common definition of critical thinking among this group, 10 categories and four themes…

This contribution deals with the adoption and interpretation of the monitorial system of education in Colombia between 1821 and 1844, a period during which this pedagogical method was almost mandatory for all the country's elementary schools. The analysis focuses on the differences between "local necessities" and "local semantic…

Background: Children who have reached the age of 2 years without having acquired a 50-word vocabulary and/or who use no word combinations are referred to in the literature as "Late Talkers". Research has not yet identified the factors that cause slow development of expressive language; in particular, relatively little research has been carried out…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of two types of vocabulary instruction--image-schema-based instruction (ISBI) and translation-based instruction (TBI)--on the acquisition of second language (L2) polysemous words. Fifty-eight Japanese high school learners of English were divided into two treatment groups (ISBI and TBI)…

An analysis of perfect verb forms in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) looks at the distribution of forms by semantic function and co-occurrence patterns in Samana English and ex-slave recordings. Results suggest that despite the overall rarity of this category in the general realm of past time, the most frequent forms used to mark it…

This collection of working papers in syntax includes: "Null Objects in Mandarin Chinese" (Christie Block); "Toward a Linearization-Based Approach to Word Order Variation in Japanese" (Mike Calcagno); "A Lexical Approach to Inalienable Possession Constructions in Korean" (Chung, Chan); "Chinese NP Structure"…

This article describes the results of a three-month experiment in the use of computer-based semantic networks for curriculum development. A team of doctoral and master's degree students developed a 1200-item computer database representing a tentative "domain of competency" for a proposed MA degree in Workforce Education and Lifelong…

Sentence comprehension is more than a syntactically autonomous issue and relies on the clues that are not part of the grammar. This paper considers "world knowledge," in this case prior knowledge of the story being read, as one such clue. In section 1, "reversibility" of sentences is discussed. "Sentence ambiguity" is discussed in section 2.…

Research has demonstrated that second language learners benefit considerably from form-focused instruction within the context of a communicative language program. Thus, it is suggested that second language teachers should provide guided, form-based instruction in a meaningful context. Instructional strategies based on three dimensions of…

This individualized inservice packet on vocabulary development in the content areas is intended to enable teachers to help students expand word meaning, using the technical vocabulary of their content areas. It is one of a nine-part series of booklets--Teaching Teen Reading--in self-instructional format intended as a practical resource for…

By comparing Alfred Korzybski's and Richard Paul's approach to critical thinking, this paper presents a procedural example of how an individual can learn and develop expertise in human communicating. The paper offers various exercises beginning with select Korzybski general semantics communication theories and moving into critical thinking…