American comic strips and cartoons can be useful in English-as-a-second-language classes. They introduce variety and provide an inside look into American life and thought. Many current popular comic strips have cultural, social, and political significance and discuss the American way of life, society, and the individual. The…

The concept of the chorophone forms the basis for this study of vowel differences between Southern Negro English and Southern white English. The author isolates chorophones for the speech community under study according to the occurrence of a particular segmental phoneme or corresponding phoneme sequences in a set of words, all of which contain…

Designed for teachers, curriculum planners, and educational researchers, this annotated bibliography includes 63 entries which deal with issues surrounding social and regional dialects and reading. The titles include journal articles and books which have been published from 1963 to 1971. It is divided into four sections: (1) "Linguistic Concepts…

Evidence seems to suggest that children whose dialects are nonstandard generally produce compositions considered lower in quality than those produced by middle and upper-middle class children. The focus of this study, therefore, was to examine the relationship between children's knowledge of the structure of their language and their judged ability…

In order to discover the linguistic competence of Hawaiian kindergarten children, tape recordings of their speech were collected, both openly and surreptitiously, in a wide variety of circumstances, including at home, at play, at school, and in formal situations. An analysis of the data reveals that the children command a wide range of linguistic…

To determine, through testing, whether archaic diction patterned after the King James Bible is actually a hindrance to the modern reader's comprehension and retention, two narratives of 2,000 words each were administered to 500 students in high school and college. Both of the narratives were composed and printed in two forms, one in archaic…

Restated in such a way as to isolate and remove the confounding influence of overall attributional style, the learned helplessness model of depression works for affective, somatic, and psychological symptoms of 160 Filipino college students. Applied to 227 American students, the restated model predicts affective and psychological, but not somatic,…

Analyzes Dewey's and Kohlberg's theories, arguing that they failed to achieve their espoused societal goals because of their emphasis on individualism. Cites linguistic evidence for this argument and urges a renewed dialog on the progressive education heritage which will more adequately reflect the social consciousness of the best religious and…

Suggests an alternative approach to the variable rule method of accounting for linguistic variability. This alternative approach, which is sensitive to social context and the relevance of meaning, is used to support an analysis of "-ing/in'" variability in some North American industrial workers' speech. (SED)

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) to investigate whether, and to what extent, the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) can be applied in Saudi Arabia; and (2) to investigate the effect on BSRI scores of exposure of Saudi Arabians to Western culture. (BW)

This study investigated how educated non-native speakers of English perceive three distinct accents of American English (Eastern; African American; and Southern) and make judgments of the speakers' background, intellect, ability, and character that might affect their employment overseas. Subjects were 53 native speakers of Turkish, (44 females, 13…

The voices in this anthology, i.e., Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Anthony Trollope, E.M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Frederick Douglass, Emily Post, Virginia Woolf, Bernard Malamud, and many others, describe the excitement of first learning to read and remind everyone of the unique companionship offered throughout life by books. The anthology…

This "insider's guide" to American and Japanese communication and misunderstanding is based on the premise that Americans and Japanese have different goals in communication; the American goal is to make messages negotiated between individuals explicit, while the Japanese goal is to keep messages implicit and assumed within the group. In…

The Exploring America's Communities (EAC) project, sponsored by the American Association of Community Colleges, involved 41 competitively-selected community colleges working to strengthen the teaching and learning of American history, literature, and culture on their campuses. Published as part of the project, these four newsletters describe the…

According to Edmund Leach (1976), boundaries are dirty. Yet power resides in the boundaries. As foreign-born instructors, the authors fall into a dirty category because they exist in cultural boundaries. This paper recognizes the American style of communication studies as a dirty category. This paper suggests that the authors' role be redefined in…