The implication of reading competence in developing reflection and thinking is an important issue for student teachers to consider. Reading is also a competence, in which the language at the disposal of a person is included, to use for social development and mutual understanding. This article is based on a case study and is concerned with how some…

According to a National Assessment of Educational Progress report, most American school children have mastered reading and writing fundamentals without learning how to analyze, evaluate, and extend ideas they read and write about. To address this "surface understanding" problem, the report recommends literacy programs aimed at high risk…

This book for beginning readers focuses on a South African woman named MaMkhize, who has no money to pay the rent or buy food because no matter how much she cries and pleads, her husband spends all the money on drinking at the "shebeen." She asks the "sangoma" for help. Together, they plan a clever trick to help stop her…

This book for beginning readers tells the story of a South African priest and his wife who are ashamed when their daughter tells them she is going to have a baby. They refuse to have anything to do with her when she is pregnant. However, when the baby comes, everything changes and they come to accept and love the baby. Large black and white…

This book for beginning readers highlights Robert Mazibuko, the "Tree Man," who spent his life teaching people how to enrich the soil and plant vegetables and trees. Born in South Africa in 1904, he lived on a farm, learning to work with livestock, raise crops, and share with the community. In college, his professor of agriculture…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 10 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effects of bilingual memory on learning vocabulary through the device of semantic mapping; (2) native American and Anglo use of compliance-gaining…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the language in a Spanish bilingual reading classroom; (2) the early stages of language acquisition of black children; (3) the dependency relation between oral…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the influence of black nonstandard English on how a person is perceived, (2) Navajo language maintenance and shift, (3) the relationship of the syntactical…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. Among the topics covered in the 31 titles are the following: the oral English syntax of bilingual Indian children in Manitoba, Canada; linguistic style shifting in black English; oral language assessment by sentence repetition;…