To help educators make informed decisions about English language learners (ELLs), this Connecting Research to Practice brief provides an overview of key research findings, highlights federal policies related to ELLs, outlines district-level and school-level action opportunities, and lists resources that offer more information. English language…

Describes the Stanford Computer Archive of Language Materials (CALM), a computerized archive of language materials available for use by researchers. (DD)

Provides suggestions for ways of exploring the varied contributions of the classical languages to our vocabulary, as well as advice for those who are involved in the area of classical teaching. Reviews several books, dealing with such topics as Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes, word bases, and other parallel phenomena of the classical…

Dramatic advances in personal computer technology have given language teachers access to vast quantities of machine-readable text, which can be analyzed with a view toward improving the basis of language instruction. Corpus linguistics provides analytic techniques and practical tools for studying language in use. This volume includes both an…

Recent linguistic research has focused on the actual uses or functions of language. Parallel to the development of discourse analysis, traditional language learning and teaching philosophies and methodologies have been supplemented or replaced by functional approaches, focusing on developing communicative competence, beyond strictly grammatical…

Provides pedagogical rules for selecting relative pronouns in Spanish. Sixteen different linguistic environments in which relative pronoun usage occurs are categorized according to their different syntactic relationships and semantic intentions. (SL)

Compares hypertext to an encyclopedia of nonsequential writing or collection of writings through which the reader is free to move in any sequence. Discusses the advantages and problems involved in hypermedia systems. (NH)

Two experiments were designed to see (1) if a cloze procedure is a valid measure of language proficiency (it seems to be) and (2) whether a cloze procedure can distinguish accurately between groups at various instructional levels (it distinguishes levels but the levels overlap). (EKN)

Describes immersion programs in the United States and Canada and reviews results of evaluative research pertaining to them. Discusses findings with respect to students' native-language development, academic achievement, and second language proficiency. Also discusses the suitability of immersion for students with distinctive, potentially…

Findings of sociolinguistic research that can be used by language teachers to elicit meaningful and authentic communication from their students are reviewed, including such factors as nonverbal cues, situation, intent, mood, and cultural norms. (MSE)

Designed for persons interested in using "A Manual for Investigating American English in the South: Field Procedures" as a tool rather than using the approach suggested in the manual, this guide provides a preliminary set of instructions for using the manual, including comments on appropriate fieldwork orientation. Section II outlines…

Discusses approaches and problems in teaching English as a second dialect writing. Also discusses the kinds of clues student writings provide on the students' progress in mastery of standard English. (EKN)

This book is designed to provide a foundation for independent research in the phonetic study of speech. Eight sections address the following: (1) introductory ideas, semiotics, the relationship between phonetics and phonology, and the concepts of accent, dialect, and language; (2) the phonetic analysis of speech and the architecture of phonetic…

Both the theoretical basis of functional-notionalism and its practical classroom applications are discussed in this text. The major characteristic of the functional-notional approach to language teaching is a sensitivity to the individual needs of students. Based on the idea that the ability to use real, appropriate language to communicate with…

Reports on research intended to determine whether easing the cognitive processing load by having writers deal with contextually familiar material improves fluency, grammaticality, and complexity of the writing. Overall results tend to indicate that writing does improve when the material is culturally familiar. (EKN)