Surveys primarily the more important English dictionaries written by American scholars or edited and published in the U.S. Canadian and Caribbean English dictionaries are dealt with secondarily. Available from University of Alabama Press, Periodicals Department, Drawer 2877, University, Alabama 35486. (KM)

It was hypothesized that prospective foreign language teachers would profess significantly more positive attitudes toward American English dialect differences than would prospective teachers of other subjects (English, mathematics, and social studies). The interaction of teacher attitudes and experience abroad, university attended, and urban…

Outlines major publishing houses' solutions to the common-gender singular pronoun problem. Maintains that the American English-speaking world employs different standards for speaking and writing, even in educated ranks. Argues that changing spoken language is probably hopeless. Proposes seven tactics through which to counter written grammar and…

Describes the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English and demonstrates its usefulness for advanced learners of English by administering a monolingual completion test, first without a dictionary and then with the BBI, to Hungarian and Russian English teachers. Both groups' scores improved dramatically on the posttest. (LMO)

Presents the results of an experiment which examined the temporal characteristics of voiceless plosives in American English, Arabic, and Arabic-accented English. Results showed that Arabic-accented English departed from the target language goal and constituted an articulation type characterizable as more Arabic than Arabic itself. (Author/SED)

The paper describes the system of rater comments used in an American College Testing (ACT) Program English language test designed for use with Japanese secondary school students learning English as a foreign language. The writing portion of the test consists of two short essays, each scored by two native speakers of North American English, using a…

Concludes that both average and superior students know their language, standard English predominated in the speech of all subgroups, and teachers should not have different expectations for males than they do for females. (RB)

Reprinted from The English Record," v21 n4 April 1971. (VM)

Handshapes with single finger extension are examined in data from 10 sign languages: American, Australian, British, Finnish, French, Japanese, Providence Island, Rennell Island, Indian, and Swedish. It is concluded that a theory of marking can be developed along the same lines as for spoken language, with only the physiology differing. (Author/MSE)

Compares variant pronunciations of "clothes" in British and American colloquial with the D. Jones "norms" taught in German schools and with the mostly incorrect pronunciations of German students of English. Considers the genesis of the errors, and discusses possibilities for correcting and preventing such errors. (IFS/WGA)

Focuses on differences in back channelling, repair, repetition, pausing, and private speech among Japanese and American study participants, based on sales negotiations. Findings indicate that differences in the deployment of such features as back channelling and pausing can result in pragma-linguistic breakdown, which is linked to culturally…

Examines the system of relative markers in early African American English as documented in the Ex-Slave Recordings. Found a higher incidence of zero marking in adverbial than in nonadverbial relatives. The lack of "wh"-relatives found, as well as this frequency of zero subject relatives, is interpreted as evidence that African American…