In the past half century, precisely during a period when a theory of language approaching adequacy has been developing, the primary function of the schools, to increase the user's knowledge of and about language, has been neglected. As a result, the gap between the concepts about language and linguistic belief, held by otherwise educated literary…

This book is an introduction to the "new" English which utilizes knowledge gained from studies and basic research to achieve practical, intelligent goals for instruction in English. The first chapter defines the new English as a study that leads students to a critical appreciation of all forms of communication, that provides them with insights…

This volume contains nineteen essays, dealing with various aspects of transformational grammar, by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Eric H. Lenneberg, and Leon Jakobovits. These essays have been reprinted from sources such as "College English" and "Language Learning" and are intended for the most part for a nontechnical audience. The anthology is…

It is necessary to classify and order structural pattern drills to assure a systematic and efficient progression in the classroom from mechanical learning to the internalizing of competence. The linguist and the language teacher must reexamine language learning theories and make changes according to the new data. Language learning is partly habit…

This unannotated bibliography lists over 400 works, published between 1924 and 1971, dealing with the phonology of about 30 languages whose speakers are frequently taught English. For these languages, the bibliography includes as complete as possible a listing of studies within the generative framework. Where the coverage by generative treatments…

Bilingual programs should focus on promoting psychosocial growth rather than language growth. Risk taking, change, and creativity should characterize the approach to bilingual education. Traditional ideas about language learning may not be suitable. It is not necessarily true that children cannot learn a second language unless it is taught to…

The reports from the 1971 Annual Meeting of the Washington Association of Foreign Language Teachers are presented in this compilation of nine abridged speeches given at the meeting. The papers include: (1) "The Three Dimensions of Successful Teaching," (2) "State of the Profession," (3) "Individualizing Instruction in Some Puget Sound Schools,"…

This document includes the abstracts of papers presented at a seminar intended to provide a survey of how the models and techniques of linguistics may be applied to the description of the German language, with a view to improving the understanding of some of the practical problems of first and second language learning. Topics range over a wide…

The ideal linguistics course for undergraduates planning to teach a foreign language is one taught by a specialist thoroughly familiar with the linguistic problems of the language in question. The specialist should also be aware of the comparative problems of the student's native language. American students expecting to teach a foreign language…

This textbook has been designed for courses in practical phonetics for beginning students. The point of view is that general phonetics is a primary skill of great importance to language students who want to acquire a fluent and accurate spoken mastery of a language in adulthood, as well as to linguists who need it as a basic tool of their…

This document describes a format for analyzing the information content of sentences and the language patterns that accompany particular information content. The author writes in terms of information structures, each information structure having a corresponding linguistic structure composed of distinctive features. The information structure of a…

Becoming bilingual as defined in this book is a process by which an adult acquires an additional language in the environment in which it is spoken, surrounded by the culture in which it is used. The book seeks to present the learner with an integrated and systematic treatment of his task--linguistic, cultural, and practical--in learning a new…

In order to gain some insight into the issue of optimum age for second language learning, the experiment described in this report was based on the negative hypothesis that there is no significant difference in the ability of randomly selected subjects, kindergarten through grade six, to imitate critical sounds and sound clusters embedded in words…

Six papers are included in this collection. "How Misconceptions about Language Affect Judgments about Intelligence," by Roger W. Shuy, and "The Cultural Context of Learning to Read," by R. P. McDermott, deal with contexts in which evaluation of a student's reading are made: a teacher's direct evaluation of a student's reading performance, and a…

This paper suggests how to restructure presentations and activities concerning the often vague and confusing topic of the theoretical underpinnings of learning a foreign language. (Author/NCR)