An analysis of Korean language textbooks currently used by Korean children and of nationally-administered reading comprehension test items for high school graduates reveals a text-oriented reading comprehension approach in South Korea. Text orientation--seeing individual words, phrases, and sentences as semantically unified into a meaningful…

The enhanced metalinguistic abilities demonstrated by additive-bilingual children, including superior control of cognitive processing, may promote the development of symbolic reasoning. Children educated in additive-bilingual (immersion) settings may maintain normal native-language development, while acquiring a second language. This study…

A study investigated the relationship between the 1982 native language proficiency of 4,700 newly-enrolled Spanish-speaking, limited-English-proficient (LEP) kindergarten through seventh grade students and their success rates in acquiring English proficiency in the following 4 years. Findings of the study, and the implications derived from the…

A method of teaching English as a second language (ESL) involving open sentence combining practice with group discussion was compared with a more traditional teaching method. Students were largely college-bound and attended the University of Arizona's ESL Center. Sentence combining was analyzed for a paragraph-length exercise on a low-level…

A study was conducted to determine: (1) whether language-impaired children have deficient paraphrase capabilities; (2) whether these deficiencies are both qualitative and quantitative; and (3) whether these abnormal skills are deterimental to normal linguistic growth. Forty-eight children from grades 1,3,5, and 7, with language impairments for…

Methods of assessing children's oral language ability are explored in this paper. Following a discussion of problems involved in the formal assessment of oral language ability, a study is described that revealed that the evaluation of the oral language of 12 kindergarten children in the social context of the natural classroom environment,…

Yugoslav elementary school students of English as a second language were the subjects of a longitudinal study to determine factors influencing the acquisition of correct English pronunciation. The students were tested for their ability to articulate 32 sounds within ten specific English words. The test was administered each year from the second…

The views of proponents and opponents of the language deficit theory--the theory that nonstandard dialect is a deficient form of language--are presented in this paper. Following a description of the work of Basil Bernstein, a British educator who is considered the key figure among proponents of the theory, the paper presents an overview of the…

The communication strategies of eight Spanish-speaking children enrolled in an elementary English as a second language (ESL) program in Austin, Texas were observed and analyzed. Strategies were found to be divisible into three categories: kinesic, paralinguistic, and linguistic. The linguistic strategies resulted in errors, but these are deemed…

Six empirical studies have revealed undesirable effects of the use of the generic term "man" and its alternative forms to indicate both males and females. The studies have dealt with the effects of the use of generic terms and of the label "Male Interest" in job advertisements, the question of whether people perceive generic terms in sentences and…

Several focal points for southwestern American Indian English research are proposed. This variation is used on reservations or in urban Indian enclaves when the "Indianness" of the discussion or participants needs formal linguistic marking. One research goal is to demonstrate that tribal varieties of Indian English actually exist.…

This paper explores the relation between the communicative and categorical functions of language and the acquisition of language production. Three major factors in language acquisition are communication, ability for representation and the process of categorization. This paper offers evidence that a sudden and dramatic increase in lexical skill…

Most of what has been taught in the language classroom for a long while has been generally a reflection of the particular concept of language popular among linguistics at the time, but recently this trend has begun to break down. Recent texts are starting to be organized according to considerations besides linguistic criteria, for example,…

For the past 100 years we have been acting as if education in school was of words, by words, and for words, but in fact verbal literacy was preceded by visual literacy when humans communicated with body language before they had speech. American educators have been concentrating efforts on the left hemisphere of the brain in which the verbal…

The ways in which current studies in sociolinguistics relate to the field of speech pathology are discussed, with particular focus on the role of sociolinguistics in standardized testing. The content validity and criterion-related validity of standardized tests is considered. Disproportionate distribution of scores for particular cultural groups…