Anticipating the arrival of Southeast Asian refugee students for the 1975-76 school year, the Syracuse School District established, as part of the Special Needs Program, an English as a Second Language (ESL) program. The students were given intensive, half-day ESL instruction at a center and attended classes with their American peers at their home…

Scaffolding strategies occurring in interactions between speech pathologists and migrant children are discussed. Various contexts and strategies are first defined, and the role of the concept of scaffolding in different types of research is examined. Finally, a corpus of therapist-child interactions is analyzed, focusing on problems of mutual…

A study of Greek speakers' ability to understand and produce two varieities of codes--Katharevousa (K) and Demotic (D)--is reported. The investigation was undertaken to provide evidence supporting or refuting the Greek government's decision to legislate Demotic as the official language of the country. A sample of 545 informants were tested with a…

Reports on three surveys of Australian Aboriginal language use, undertaken to determine the language groups' needs for translation and literacy projects, are presented. "Communicability of Some Western Desert Communilects" by K. C. Hansen evaluates mutual intelligibility between languages and dialects in that region, and addresses the complicating…

Noting that collaboration can enhance children's ability to solve problems of increasing difficulty, this paper discusses the theory of collaborative talk in the classroom and how it can be applied. The first section of the paper introduces the notion of collaborative talk by describing a classroom setting and offering an excerpt of two children…

This volume includes 12 of the 24 papers presented at the Third Annual California Linguistics Conference. Selections are drawn from each of the four sessions, covering semantic and lexical structure, phonology, syntax, and language in context. Each of the papers includes a bibliography, as well as diagrams, charts, and appendixes when necessary.…

Despite similarities between Hindi and Urdu and mutual intelligibility, at least on the spoken level, slight grammatical differences between the two languages do exist. The treatment of gender provides an example of such differences. Explanation of the actual differences in gender usage can be based on a synchronic, linguistic level as well as on…

Uses Weinreich's (1953) partition of bilingualism to describe the effects of a small typological distance on the organization of the bilingual lexicon. Using standard Dutch and the dialect of Maastricht, subjects performed an auditory lexical decision task. (30 references) (Author/CK)

This is an introductory study of the mutual intelligibility among the various dialects and languages in the Manitowinini family. Specific languages considered include Powhatan, Lenape, Natick, Otchipwe, and Nanticoke. The goal of the study is not merely to comprehend inter-tribal relations better, but also to discover the actual…

In forming a theory of communicative interaction between human beings it is necessary to consider some general features implicit in the communicative process. These include the context of situation, philosophical categories, psycholinguistic categories, grammatical categories, and nonverbal categories. Most of these are extra-linguistic and have…

This learning activity package is designed to help apprentices understand some of the different ways in which words can be used to mean different things, depending on where and when one uses the words. It provides examples of words and phrases that are used in the workplace in ways different from the way they are used in regular conversation. Five…

This paper discusses an ongoing study being conducted at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah concerning ways of improving communication teaching to graduate students, especially those in the business administration program. The paper also discusses some current research on language and management and some preliminary results of fourth year…

An attempt to adapt the U.S.-based IDEA (Instructional Development by Evaluation and Assessment) system to Great Britain is described. This widely-used method of faculty evaluation based on student ratings was pioneered by Kansas State University. Among the features of IDEA are the following: it relates student perceptions of teacher behavior to…

The techniques, procedures, and principal findings of 15 different experiments in a research program on interactive communication are summarized in this paper. Among the principal findings reported are that: problems are solved faster in communication modes that have a voice channel than in those that do not have a voice channel, modes of…

Some insight into the relationship between language and thought can be achieved through a comparison between American Sign Language and English. This paper discusses several studies on this topic and defines some of the problems. The author feels that the deaf using American Sign Language cannot be considered linguistically deficient. A structural…