The junior high and senior high school English teacher should not judge dialect speakers as inferior to speakers of standard English but should rather be concerned with teaching his students the power and use of dialects. At the same time, he should capitalize on the students' dialect skills to teach them standard English skills. Teaching…

How soon does a child learn to discriminate orthographic units in his written language as distinguished from a general form-discrimination ability. A discrimination test of letters, words, or characters, in three written languages, Chinese, Hindi, and English, at three age levels, from four to five and a half years was given to 153 middle class…

The object of this catalogue is to make available basic information on the tape archive of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (Canberra, Australia). The collection consists mainly of tape recordings of Australian aboriginal languages and music. Other tapes contain descriptions of aboriginal customs, myths of the various tribes told in…

The Bay Area Bilingual Education League (BABEL) is a merger of four districts concerned with bilingual education for Spanish-speaking, Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children. BABEL sponsored a Bilingual Methodologies Institute, designed to meet the needs of its teachers and teacher assistants in the classroom. The institute covered all…

Explores cloze sensitivity to global comprehension by means of retrospective interview techniques. No significant differences were found between English as a second language (ESL) college students (N=14) and native English-speaking students (N=14) in their processing strategies. (Author/CB)

Papers for the fourth Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) Conference include the following: "Endangered languages and Literacy" (Nicholas Ostler, Blair Rudes); "Keynote Address: On Native Language Literacy: a Personal Perspective" (Ofelia Zepeda); "A Community's Solution to Some Literacy Problems: The Mayangna of…

Many immigrants, refugees, and aboriginal Canadians learn their own languages in the normal, informal way. These minority languages learned informally are not valued as a skill that yields returns in the labor market in the same way the official languages or formally learned languages do. What counts as a skill in a society, in a given point in…

This paper is a pedagogically-oriented case study of a "Gaikokugo" Communication course conducted in an intensive format. After a brief introduction and consideration of the intensive course format, the pedagogical approach guiding the course (together with samples of the materials used in the course provided in the appendix) is…

This study focuses on electronic office hour consultations and investigates the presence and organization of pragmatic elements associated with negotiating the completion and evaluation of coursework in the e-mail messages of 28 American and international students to an American professor. Findings indicate a lack of negotiation skills in the…

This book is intended to be an introduction to the sound system of the Spanish language. The book is descriptive in nature and presents a true picture of the language as it is spoken by native speakers from a wide variety of dialect zones. The book is divided into five parts and 25 chapters. Part one, Phonetics and Phonology," includes the…

To promote inter-American understanding, a number of public-school systems, teacher-preparing institutions, State and county education departments, and the U. S. Office of Education recently cooperated in a series of experimental or demonstration centers. This bulletin describes the work carried on by 22 of these centers aided by a grant from the…

A restructured core curriculum at Saint Anselm College includes an interdisciplinary humanities program incorporating a required foreign language sequence. Introductory courses use native speakers in weekly informal conversation sessions to prepare students for a later required culture and civilization course taught in the foreign language. (MSE)

Examines methodology used to determine a hierarchy of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students' written error gravity and describes a new error substitution methodology for identifying the communicative interference effect of ESL errors on naive native speakers of English. Findings indicate that lexical and verb-related errors interfered with…

Discusses politeness strategies used by native and Dutch speakers of Spanish, contrasting the act of making requests by these two groups of speakers. One of the article's conclusions states that native speakers of Spanish are more direct in their requests, and that nonnative speakers attempt to sound less face-threatening and less offensive. (23…

Discusses the discourse strategies that status-unequal interlocutors use in expressing disagreement. Reveals semantic formulas as influenced by the role relationships and compares and contrasts the discourse strategies used by native speakers of Turkish and American English for the same speech event in order to obtain a cross-culture perspective.…