A sampling of over 100 ideas submitted by elementary school teachers at the Idea Exchange at the annual meetings of the National Council of Teachers of English are contained in this collection of teaching tips. The first chapter, "Getting to Know Each Other," includes games to help students learn each other's names, directions for making a…

Two basic approaches to language treatment have been defined, the policy approach and the cultivation approach. The former deals with the selection of a national language, standardization, literacy, orthography, and the stratification of code varieties, and is a macro approach. The latter concerns correctness, efficiency, specialized functions,…

Based on the work of 11 women and men from the Commission on Writing formed by the Council for Basic Education, this book concerns the necessity and rewards of learning to write. The book stresses teaching and learning writing in the English class, but it also views writing activities as parts of general education. Considering the unsatisfactory…

Student editorials and letters to the editor that appeared in selected school newspapers during two school years (1949-1950 and 1973-1974) were analyzed to determine whether the more recent writing revealed characteristics usually associated with oral expression, a hypothetically negative influence of television viewing. In the analysis, only five…

This book combines background information on language and communication with methods for developing specific skills needed to cope with the daily communication problems. Comments on environmental effects on language development, on differences in dialects, on reasons for teaching grammar, and on types of grammar precede a discussion of the impact…

Lectures presented at the 1965 National Defense Education Act Institutes for Advanced Study in English are presented in this book. Selected for their interest to both experienced and prospective English teachers, the lectures are grouped into four categories. (1) Of general interest to the English teacher are John Gerrietts' portrait of the…

This final report gives the findings of a government research project, the broad objective of which was to determine the existence of heightened covert oral behavior in the performance of tasks in which the response class had not yet been empirically studied and to ascertain the function of the covert oral response. Areas covered by this report…

Two methods of analysis, logical and psychological (or, loosely, aesthetic and functional) are used to investigate the many kinds of languages man uses to communicate, the ways in which these languages operate, and the reasons for communication failures. Based on a discussion of the nature of symbols, since most languages of communication draw…

Students in college basic writing courses need to consider their own written language and to compare it with other students' work before they can develop a sense of the symbolic relationship between language and experience. Because of a lack of previous writing experience, basic writers have no sense that the "facts" about which they…

An overview of language concepts suggests applications of linguistics to the teaching of English at all levels of instruction. Traditional grammar, with its emphasis on syntax and written language, is discussed and then compared to generative grammar, with its emphasis on transformational theory. A discussion of usage summarizes the changes in…

The experimental program in remedial composition described in this interim report was designed on the assumption that students could best learn to write minimally acceptable compositions by imitating paragraph and essay models which have been divided into a series of incremental steps. The objectives of the program were to develop a heuristic…

Only the approach that integrates a study of both the "what" and the "how" of a discipline will be relevant to the practicing English teacher. Missing between the two extremes of specialized subject matter research and conventional educational research is research into the structure of a particular discipline, exploring it as a body of knowledge,…

The loss of richness and multiplicity of word meaning can result in a decline in the metaphoric activity of the mind. A technologically-oriented civilization pressures students to devalue word connotation in favor of denotative exactitude. To counteract this tendency, teachers should adopt for themselves and instill in their students a regard for…

The work itself should help a person who is going to teach reading and writing. Practical suggestions are offered in the final two chapters, while the opening three give intellectual perspectives. A theme binds the work of letting the consciousness of writing as a visual system be increased and of breaking the spell by which letter phonetics can…

In early stages of writing, the writing process encourages "writing the way we talk," but in the end students are expected to write as academicians: a student must control his/her written level of language. For English speaking students, needing to belong to ingroups, and the casual attitude of American society both contribute to students'…