This article, reporting a study of teacher attitudes toward the linguistic situation in their Caribbean communities, suggests that the social values attached to varieties of English in Creole Communities must be regarded as substantially different from those which obtain in more usual dialect situations. (POP)

A study of the acquisition of interrogative forms in children of high socioeconomic status reveals that utterances belong more to the colloquial than to the standard range. It is concluded that disadvantaged children would show similar usage, leading to the suggestion that teachers teach language as they use it. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

This article provides an inventory of works in applied linguistics published in Switzerland during the last fifteen years, and concludes that the limited amount of research in the field is due to the secondary position allotted to general linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics in Swiss universities. (Text is in…

Because Chinese language textbooks were judged inadequate in teaching vocabulary dealing with everyday life in the U.S. and in China, new methods and materials were introduced into an oral Chinese course. Prepared discussion topics, Chinese films, soap operas, and shortwave radio broadcasts were used. (CHK)

Romani is a language of Indo-Aryan origin that is spoken in Europe by people known as gypsies (who usually refer to themselves as Rom). There are upwards of 3.5 million speakers of Romani. This book discusses the historical and linguistic origins of the Romani-speaking population. It examines in-depth the changes in the sound system, grammatical…

This collection of 22 papers offers a detailed record of the development of the field and its modern extension. Part 1, "The Dutch Contribution: 'Little Arrows'," includes: (1) "Informant Classification of Dialects" (W.G. Rensink); (2) "Dialects" (Jo C. Daan); and (3) "The Netherlands-German National Border as a…

This study examined the views of college learners of German regarding desired degrees of first language (L1) versus second language (L2) use, how desired language use related to observed language use for students and teachers, gaps between desired and observed language, tasks for which students expressed strong preference for L1 and for L2, how…

This chapter responds to an article by Claire Kramsch on the privilege of nonnative speakers. It agrees with Kramsch that in second language teaching, there is no single standard of native speaker language to target, since the cultural and linguistic reality of a given language is too complex and multifaceted to allow identification of…

This dictionary is intended to bridge the gap between the basic, generally simple language learned in the classroom and the preponderance of nonformal and idiomatic language used in Brazilian society on all levels and in contemporary Brazilian literature. It is the product of 15 years of systematic research involving interviews and conversations…

Ethnoscience studies, and studies of color vocabulary in particular, have firmly established that to understand the full range of meaning of a word in any language, each new language must be approached on its own terms, without a priori theories of semantic universals. It has been shown that color words in fact encode a great deal of…

This article examines how participants in an interview use different linguistic and social resources in order to construct multiple, complex self-representations. It discusses interviews from a critical discourse perspective. In particular, it suggests that interviews are sites of struggle where individuals strive to construct representations of…

This book contends that in the United States, manner of speech and educational background reflect cultural status, and it attempts to prove through interviews with six American women that what is described as illiteracy is in fact shutting down in response to those in positions of power. After an introduction, "Language, Literacy, and…

Argues that the temptation to isolate Black Englsh and to identify it as a single cause for all black problems in America must be resisted; e.g. those who suggest that Black English usage is the primary cause of reading problems in black children ignore many factors which may be possible causes of failure, such as inadequate schools. (Author/JM)