This book focuses on successful classroom practices which used oral communication to develop student confidence in a variety of speaking situations and to expand student understanding of literature through both analysis and performance. The book contains the following essays, listed here with their authors: (1) "Follow the Bouncing Ball"…

English is a stress-timed language whose syllables have a much wider variety of onsets, codas, and combinations than many languages. English also has the widest range of syllable length and quality between stressed and unstressed syllables and a distinctive pattern of intervals between stressed syllables. These characteristics make it difficult…

Once speech educators turn their attention to the "ideational" function of oral language--that portion pertaining to thinking--rather than the relational function, they will see that speech can and should be incorporated into every discipline. The psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky envisions the ways in which humans use speech to reorder their…

This textbook for the third grade provides a series of schoolroom situations to give pupils experiences in speaking and writing good English. The situations include child life and the heroic aspects of mature life, fairies and fairyland, and the outer world, particularly animal life. Then, each situation is considerably extended, not only that…

Describes how a teacher used planned observations of classroom interactions to lead to role playing, class discussion, and changes in seating arrangements. The strategies resulted in marked improvements in classroom interactions and in academic work. (SKC)

Provides an inventory of traditional techniques used in the teaching of pronunciation of English as a second language. Most of the techniques are production-oriented, for their purpose is to improve production of spoken English. (CB)

Many would argue that the state of urban science education has been static for the past several decades and that there is little to learn from it. Rather than accepting this deficit perspective, this book strives to recognize and understand the successes that exist there by systematically documenting seven years of research into issues salient to…

An extracurricular program in an Australian university French language program that brings together adults of varying ages and nationalities for oral language development activities is described. The program uses improvisation, psychodrama and role playing, and suggestopedia all together to develop a theme or in alternation, for creativity and…

Beginning braille readers may benefit from an integrated-literacy curriculum which reflects the interrelationships of oral language, reading, and writing, and stresses the pleasurable and purposeful aspects of literacy. Integrating braille materials into daily curriculum activities can assist students to make the read/write connection and to begin…

Prochievement tests, hybrids of proficiency and achievement tests, assess students' linguistic and communicative competence and provide a means for formative evaluation of student progress. Assessing Spanish listening comprehension/speaking proficiency, creating listening/oral proficiency test formats, and scoring are described. Guidelines for…

In this article, the author describes the place of the oral proficiency guidelines as the only nationally recognized criteria for the assessment of communicative competence in speaking across languages and discusses learning outcomes studies based on the proficiency guidelines. The guidelines are now 20 years old, but learning outcomes are not…

This manual presents activities designed to encourage speaking in elementary and secondary school French language classes at the novice and intermediate proficiency levels. Following guidelines outlined in the Utah "Foreign Language Mastery Curriculum Guide," each of the activities is identified according to the topic, level, and…

This instructional guide for Alberta's (Canada) secondary school program in French second language instruction presents instructional plans and describes specific classroom techniques and activities for listening comprehension and oral production. Section 1 outlines the overall objectives and structure of the program. Section 2 addresses the…

Although theories on developmental writing assume that basic writers do not write well because of cognitive deficits, recent research and classroom experience suggest that poor writers lack skill because they have not had sufficient contextually meaningful practice. Writing research indicates that the unskilled writer's tendency to write as if…

This collection of classroom ideas for the elementary school teacher contains learning activities, teaching methods, and suggestions on a wide variety of topics. The 22 teacher-submitted articles include ideas on writing, art, getting acquainted, vocabulary, self-esteem, open house, Halloween, mathematics, drama, hobbies, Valentine's Day, oral…