A 3-year study was undertaken to identify the salient features of verbal academic (math and science) language performance of third- and sixth-grade students. The investigation classified both native and nonnative English-speaking students as either effective communicators/responders or unsuccessful communicators/responders. The study examined…

The paper provides a brief discussion of research conducted in child language acquisition at the University of California at Davis in the winter and spring of 1977. The research was directed at children's comprehension of WHY questions. It was an attempt to define when and how children come to understand abstract concepts, such as WHY questions.…

In a recent paper (1977) Levenston and Blum suggested that lexical simplification operates according to universal principles, and that these derive from the individual's semantic competence in his mother tongue. This paper examines the validity of this suggestion by means of a comparative study of lexical simplification in three different…

This bulletin provides information on two educational disadvantages of language-minority persons in the United States based on an analysis of data from the nationwide Survey of Income and Education (SIE), conducted in the spring of 1976 by the Bureau of the Census. Language-minority persons were found to be educationally disadvantaged on two key…

Using data gathered over a three-year period in three Southern California towns, the family structure and the reliance on kin for emotional support of Anglo Americans and Mexican Americans were compared. The first year 666 Mexican Americans and 340 Anglos were interviewed. In the second year, 372 Mexican Americans and 163 Anglos were…

This paper reports on a program developed to prepare teaching materials for the instruction of French to adolescents who have French as a native language but no longer speak French at home. A principal goal is to create situations that will inspire students to communicate in French, and to avoid purely academic exercises. Since students tend to…

In Resolution No. 4 of their 7th Conference (Brussels, June 1971) the Ministers of Education of 21 nations signatory to the European Cultural Convention instructed the Committee of Senior Officials to study, in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Council of Europe, the practical arrangements for holding an ad hoc conference on problems…

Basic to a progressive and meaningful program of education which will shape Indian destiny for America's tomorrow is an understanding of past educational endeavors. The text surveys, therefore, former Federal policies and highlights the pioneering work which typifies such schools as the Sherman Indian High School (Riverside, California), Haskell…

This report, the first of a series of papers on educational issues and problems, discusses the special problems of the Hispanic population in New Jersey schools. It describes the joint efforts of the Department of Education, the Commissioner of Education, community groups, and schools to find ways to resolve the problems facing the…

In the rapidly changing political, economic, and social life of West Africa, there is a renewed interest in cultural identity. This book describes the developments and the difficulties experienced by different West African countries in the use of mother tongues in multi-lingual society. The book was commissioned to give scholars, educators, and…

Describes the training of teachers of Hungarian as a mother tongue, who are also trained to be applied linguists, including details on institutional training programs, retraining programs, benefits of dual training, and differences between training teachers of Hungarian as a native language and as a second language. (CB)

This paper is an overview of topics covered at two sessions of the Fourth Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium, from the perspective of a native speaker of an indigenous language and member of a university academic community. The first section describes a Master's thesis on White Mountain Apache (WMA) language shift. Interviews with…

A notable feature of developing interlanguage grammars is the apparent optionality in those areas of grammar where optionality is not characteristic of stable state grammars. In the Valueless Features Hypothesis, it is proposed that the appearance of apparent optionality in the very early stages of interlanguage development is due to the partial…

The majority of indigenous U.S. languages are no longer learned at home, and the last generation of native speakers are aging. There are increasingly strong efforts by communities to keep their languages alive by developing teaching programs in their schools and communities, although finding teachers is problematic. This paper focuses on how…

This study looks at the effect of native speaker (NS) teacher input on limited-English-proficient (LEP) students' access to classroom speech events. It seeks to determine whether content area teachers modify their talk when interacting with LEP students in the classroom. The study also seeks to describe such modifications and establish whether…