Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

Discusses the treatment of Chinese word order in major theoretical works, reference grammars, and textbooks. Guidelines for teachers to give first year students include: 1)predominant Chinese word order is SVO; 2) SOV and OSV word orders are permissible but used for contrastive purposes; and 3) only certain forms are permissible for SOV and OSV.…

Features of telexes used for business correspondence are discussed, including omission of parts of verbs, definite and indefinite articles, pronouns, and prepositions, and also word abbreviations. The telex is different from other abbreviated texts (such as telegrams), and Business English courses should include instruction in telex writing.…

Describes Jacobson's New Concurrent Approach to bilingual instruction, which systematically incorporates intersentential code-switching to teach content to limited English proficient children raised in a bilingual environment, and how such incorporation and adaptation contributes to the balanced distribution of the two codes in question. (24…

A review of recent research concerning the syntactical and grammatical characteristics of business German precedes an exploration of the occurrence and sequencing of these characteristics in American college textbooks. Particular attention is given to the passive voice. (Author/CB)

The second of three volumes on the relationship between writing research and instruction, this report first describes a 1982 conference on writing policies and problems sponsored by the Educational Research and Development division of the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) and the California State University, Long Beach. The second section…

Noting that the lack of prosodic information in printed text may be a source of difficulty for children who are learning to read, this paper explores the features of language underlying the acoustic and perceptual segmentation of sentences into meaningful units. Using evidence from studies in speech production and perception, the paper addresses…

Intended for preservice and inservice teachers at all educational levels, but especially for those in English education classes, this book examines the foundations of grammar instruction and supplies some definitions and examples of grammar usage. Part one of the book explores relevant language research, reasons for teaching grammar, the…

Describes the highlights of the activities and papers presented at the conference including the following: an analysis of Chinese data processing systems and Chinese sentences, natural language processing, language lesson authoring systems, character recognition, and character input. Future work in the field may include studies on Chinese…

Discusses the use of prepositional phrases as subjects and objects through consideration and analysis of: (1) characteristics of such phrases; (2) category status of prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions; and (3) sentences containing prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions. (CB)

Discusses the collected research on free modifiers and "minor sentences," or "formal fragments." Asks English teachers for less concentration on initial placement of modifiers, less rigidity concerning fragments, and more practice with punctuating final free modifiers. (RL)

This study presents a view of diachronic change in language which focuses on the conflicting interaction of principles determining language organization. Principles of structural and perceptual nature are in conflict in language of the Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) type, because of the relative clause construction. Theoretical and empirical evidence…

Reading and writing are both creative acts of communication that use written language as a vehicle for meaning. A strong theoretical case for teaching the two processes concurrently can be built by examining points of contact between reading and writing. One such point is context concerns. The Communication Triangle model (author/audience/…

An overview of the research literature reviews studies on the effectiveness of sentence-combining (SC) exercises in helping English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students integrate their knowledge of grammar into their writing. In the 1960s, Kellog Hunt published a series of articles that explored the relationship between SC and writing skills.…

Many factors influence the comprehension of a linguistic act by a listener or reader. Some, such as maturity, background, and interests of the decoder are nonlinguistic; others, such as the vocabulary and complexity of the morphological and syntactical structures are linguistic in nature. A review of the literature reveals that while studies have…