This book provides a summary of past and cutting-edge research on the acquisition of language by young children. It lends support to the behavioralist paradigm of language acquisition, namely, that maternal rewards and corrections should be integrated with perceptual, cognitive, and social learning conceptualizations in a skill-learning approach…

The linguistic theory of contrastive analysis, which provides pragmatic insights into the teaching of foreign languages, can be equally successful when applied to the teaching of one dialect of a language to speakers of its other dialects. This paper briefly illustrates how a theoretically constructed hierarchy of difficulty, originally designed…

Language switching (language alternation, code switching), the rapid alternation from one language to another, may or may not convey more than the cognitive significance of the message. Linguists have demonstrated the metaphorical or connotative significance of switching, but have not fully discussed the various forms switching takes. The present…

The acquisition of Standard English by speakers of other languages and by speakers of non-standard dialects seems to differ (1) in motivation, (2) in the perception of Standard English, (3) in the social significance of Standard English, (4) in the cultural heritage and its influence on man's identity and self-respect, (5) in the source…

Studying the lexical borrowing of the Japanese community living in Hawaii inspires several hypotheses in the field of sociolinguistics. The use of borrowed words is a linguistic device to create a new Japanese dialect--Hawaiian Japanese. The borrowed words reflect the process and degree of social and psychological adjustment to the new cultural…

In recent years a considerable amount of interest has developed in language variability and in the educational problems connected with it. This volume is a report of linguistic research on the variable language behavior in a community of American English speakers, specifically on some aspects of tense marking in Black English. The following topics…

The idea that vowel nuclei in many northern European languages can be divided into peripheral and non-peripheral categories is discussed. Peripheral vowels are those located at the edge of the vowel envelope, and non-peripheral nuclei are those located on the inside. This assertion has not received as much scrutiny as it should. There are at least…

Evidence exists that, in the past, phonetic variants functioned as sociolinguistic variables, just as they do today, at least in societies with comparable stratificational patterns. This paper presents the significant details of the sociolinguistic environment within which the beginnings of the Great English Vowel Shift were embedded. An attempt…

This paper attempts to elucidate the relationship between linguistic form, interactional strategies and social meaning on the basis of a detailed study of a natural conversation. The investigation is based on a conversation recorded in an institution for Mexican immigrants by a linguist, a native American of Mexican ancestry, and program advisor…

The difference between "foreign language learning" and "second language learning" is not clear because writers do not agree on the criteria to be used in making the distinction. Moreover, there is a lack of empirical evidence to justify the use of the two terms. The purpose of this study is: (1) to review the various criteria…

This volume is a collection of articles on various aspects of applied linguistics as it relates to language teaching. Chapter 1, by S. Pit Corder, entitled "Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching," gives a short, general survey of applied linguistics in language teaching. Chapters 2-5 give an account of the main concepts in what is now called…

This paper seeks to underline the importance of at least acknowledging the existence of a complex set of rules in a grammar of social interaction--and the further reality that while there may be a grammar of social interaction, there are also grammars of social interaction for different groups. It should be possible to find that apparently…

This collection of 52 papers in the field of applied linguistics presents ideas of diversified topics. General and specific topics in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and language instruction are covered. Testing, teaching methods, speech problems, and the use of computers, language laboratories, radio, and television are…

The language situation of immigrants to Australia, or social bilinguals, is distinguished from that of second language learners, or cultural bilinguals. The former lag behind in employment and school achievement. The solution proposed entails learning English, though both children and adults appear to reach a plateau in learning after initial…

One of the ways in which language testing interfaces with applied linguistics is in the definition and validation of the constructs that underlie language tests. When language testers and score users interpret scores on a test, they do so by implicit and explicit reference to the construct on which the test is based. Equally, when applied to new…