Three phases mark the instruction of indigenous languages since the precolonial period. Nigeria has more than 200 native languages, and the problems of instruction involve national language policy, the capabilities of the languages to cope with modern life, lack of prepared teachers, lack of understanding of language structures, teaching…

This study examined the impact of Chapter 1 Developing Language Arts Competencies through Literature (DLACL) program in Houston, Texas, in the academic achievement of students served during the 1988-89 school year. A total of 8,505 students in grades 1-5 were served by the program. The investigation was designed to provide answers to the following…

Summarizing research activities in 1989, this is the fifteenth annual report of research on speech perception, analysis, synthesis, and recognition conducted in the Speech Research Laboratory of the Department of Psychology at Indiana University. The report contains the following 21 articles: "Perceptual Learning of Nonnative Speech…

A study of the extent to which the sequence-of-tenses rule (STR) is used in television news reporting in the United States is presented. The study examines which tenses are shifted most frequently and explains the uses and functions of tense variation. It is argued that STR is not always a semantically and pragmatically unmarked form as proposed…

Efforts to simplify language used in consumer documents come from the consumer movement and a public disillusioned with big business and government. Even before President Carter's 1978 executive order mandating simplification in government regulations, some agencies were revising regulations for clarity. However, these efforts were based on too…

As the field of sociolinguistics has emerged, its terminology, which like many other emerging disciplines contains many neologisms and new usages, has sometimes been called insensitive. This reaction may interfere with serious examination of the field's content. Areas of disagreement or dispute include terms used for the speech of black…

A sample of 150 Japanese English-as-a-Second-Language students at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale was given a reading comprehension test containing three levels of questions: factual, generalization, and inference, to measure comprehension effects at different proficiency strata. The results indicated that there were significant…

The demonstratives in Napali are outlined, and their operation within the language system is analyzed. Demonstratives in Nepali are words used to refer to places, things, names, and activities. The reference may be endophoric (in which case the referents are in the text) or exophoric (in which case the referents are in the context or situation).…

Language testing is an area of applied linguistics that combines the exercise of professional judgment about language, learning, and the nature of the achievement of language learning with empirical data about student performance and, by inference, their abilities. The relationship between judgments and empirical data in language testing is…

The verb stem "maka" ("give") in Nahuatl is unusual in its range of options with respect to transitivity. Like all transitive verb stems, it regularly occurs with an object and must do so, but it also appears in an unusually large number of constructions in which it has two objects. These constructions are examined within the…

An examination of some surface differences between quantifier phrases (QP) in standard Italian, Genoese dialect, and French is reported. The analysis makes specific reference to the distribution of empty noun phrase and adjectival phrase categories in SpecN, and uses the concept of inflectional rules. Although details have not yet been worked out,…

The behavior of verbal "-s" is examined in two data sets on early Black English as represented by: (1) tape-recorded interviews with native English-speaking residents of a region of the Dominican Republic; and (2) the ex-slave recordings housed in the Library of Congress. Each verbal construction with the potential for variable…

Developing and integrating two lines of research, one focusing on discourse and the other on intention recognition in discourse, this paper presents the basic elements of a computational theory of discourse. The paper argues that by specifying the basic units a discourse comprises and the ways in which they can relate, an account of discourse…

The selection of place names (toponyms) for use on a map depends on the available space. This selection may be distorted by regulations, cartographic procedures, preferences, or map functions. An investigation of place names used on maps of minority language group areas in Western Europe revealed the influence of cartographers and topographers on…