A study investigated the extent to which oral language forms influence the written products of Mexican-American students attending an inner city school in a low income neighborhood. For the study, writing samples from 78 third grade and 92 sixth grade students were analyzed for Spanish, interlanguage, and Chicano English features. (Interlanguage…

Used as an integral part of the migrant student skills system operated by the Migrant Student Record Transfer System (MSRTS), the oral language skills list contains a catalog of skills typical of the K-12 grade range. This catalog includes a sample of the MSRTS transmittal record which permits teachers to report the skills being worked on at the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: children's sociolinguistics skills, ability to sequence verbal expressions, analogical abilities, and learning and application of the principle for nouns; Basil…

The ten articles in this yearbook were drawn from Arizona State University's Annual Reading Conference. The first two articles present different perspectives on current research in the teaching of reading comprehension, the third offers a systematic plan for teaching comprehension to remedial readers, and a fourth looks at reading as a tool for…

The purpose of this publication is to explain how a child learns and how language development is related to motor, emotional, and cognitive development. Following a brief introductory chapter, it presents a chapter on how a child learns, divided into the following categories: motor development; emotional development; language development; the…

The sound system of English is described in all its complexity, from the relationship between spelling and pronunciation to the rules of connected speech, focusing on the methods and rationale of teaching pronunciation of English, particularly to English as a second language learners. (CB)

Three discourse-related formal aspects of model-imitation pairs were analyzed longitudinally in successive samples from two Hungarian children. Results revealed an unbroken developmental trend leading to lexically coherent conversational replies and that imitation aided the children in learning the lexicon, making phonological approximations of…

Cognitive, behavior, achievement, and English/French speaking skills were correlated with ratings of oral French ability for third-grade francophone and anglophone immersion students. Teacher ratings correlated with achievement and cooperativeness, but independent ratings didn't. Objective evaluation procedures should be developed to minimize the…

The set of materials are designed for the assessment of literacy, English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL), listening and reading comprehension, and/or job-related skills of factory workers, and are based on work-related tasks. The materials consist of instructions for administering the test, a picture prompt booklet for the test administrator to use…

This report details the First Steps Developmental Continua project in a West Australian primary school with a highly culturally diverse student population to (1) ascertain whether recently-established early childhood education developmental guidelines and the corresponding curriculum are useful to map the development of…

The development of the Stanford Foreign Language Oral Skills Evaluation Matrix (FLOSEM), a rating scale for assessing communicative proficiency in foreign languages, is described. Information on the utility of the FLOSEM is presented based on the results of three studies. Oral proficiency measures were obtained by means of the FLOSEM from 573 high…

A study investigated the degree to which the pronunciation of English words in the child's home environment affected the acquisition or discrimination of phonological and orthographic correspondences of standard written English. Subjects were low-socioeconomic-status, inner-city African American kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students, who…

Aligned with its 1998 standards for first and second language learning, Alberta Learning has published lesson plans that aim for a closer relationship between learning and evaluation. Each volume in this series presents a specific task for students that involves planning, carrying out, and evaluating their work. The task for seventh grade students…

The report, entirely in French, describes Alberta's curriculum for high school French immersion, as revised in 1998. An introductory section offers background information on the curriculum revision, links between the core curriculum and French immersion, underlying principles of second language instruction, the revised curriculum's objectives and…

Chapters in this book include the following: "Dickens as Sociolinguist: Dialect in 'David Copperfield'" (Patricia Poussa); "Contemporary Irish Writing and a Model of Speech Realism (John M. Kirk); "Dialect and Accent in Jim Cartwright's Play "Road" as Seen Through Erving Goffman's Theory on Footing" (Marion Fields); "The Representation of…