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…

A study was conducted to investigate oral language used in fourth- and fifth-grade student dyads in a collaborative writing setting in order to understand better how children learn to write. The study was based on a theoretical framework that emphasized the interrelatedness of thought, language, and learning. Following a pilot study, students in…

Topics covered in papers presented at a Finnish workshop on discourse analysis include, in English: the situational code in conversation; persuasive strategies and face-work in impromptu speech; historical aspects of complex behavioral strategies in politeness; the implications of predictability and unpredictability for negotiation discourse; and…

Since 1985, Tarrant County Junior College, Northeast Campus, in Hurst, Texas has offered workshops and classes for secondary school teachers of foreign languages. The series of 10 16-hour workshops held during summer 1987 were intended primarily as in-service training for secondary school foreign language teachers and secondarily as a retraining…

Intended for classroom and prospective teachers, this book presents ways for integrating music, art, and drama into the elementary curriculum. Described are experiences and activities in the arts that can be used as teaching tools in basic elementary school curriculum areas. Contents are selected so that no special training, knowledge, or skills…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 33 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) aphesis in English; (2) the linguistic representation of tone; (3) discourse structure and anaphora in written and conversational English; (4) a tagmemic…

A combined teacher's manual and learner's manual for the Lorma language of Liberia presents materials for about 300 hours of study and is the equivalent of a first-year college language course. The basic text introduces all of the syntactic constructions of Lorma that learners are likely to encounter in the language, and introduces 1,000…

An ethnographic study of kindergarten through grade two classrooms was conducted of various sociolinguistic contexts in which young students were developing oral and written language competencies. Nonparticipant observations were conducted in both regular classrooms and Chapter I small group classroom settings. The observations were analyzed from…

Differences between English and Arabic are examined to assist the English as a second language (ESL) teacher. It is suggested that in order to know how to help students, ESL teachers must understand what the problem or difference is and why it is occurring. The sound systems of English and Arabic, including the suprasegmentals of intonation,…

This packet is the third of five developed as a set of self-appraisal instruments with which teachers (and others) can systematically examine their instruction methods in communication skills. The packet contains forms for teachers, students, administrators, and parents addressing two levels of specificity: responses to the overall communication…

When working with limited English proficient (LEP) children who have been mainstreamed into regular elementary school classrooms, teachers must keep in mind that the first order of business is to help the students build a store of knowledge about English--how it sounds, what it looks like in print, and what it means. Teachers will discover that it…

Three sets of goals useful for assessing student competencies in speaking and listening are reviewed in this paper. The first instrument examined, derived from a report of that Speech Communication Association's National Project on Speech Communication Competencies for all grades, lists (1) five assumptions concerning the nature of communication…

This is one of three volumes of instructional games devised to further the development of childrens' listening, logical thinking, problem solving, and effective oral communication skills. The games are designed to create a relaxed, informal setting in which teachers can encourage and support children's natural speech and provide language…

The 13 chapters in this volume explore what is known and what still needs to be learned about the complex relationships between speaking and writing. The first chapter in the book provides a detailed overview of linguistic studies of oral and written language relationships. The next three chapters focus on the relationships between children's oral…

Language development, including literacy learning (reading and writing) was studied in a first grade classroom in a culture-in-contact situation. The language behavior of three boys--one mainstream culture member, another from black inner-city culture, and a third from Appalachian culture--and the language of a teacher from mainstream culture were…