Analyzing language use samples of students who use bimodal (signed-and-spoken) communication can help assess specific language skills, determine language development level, and measure progress over time. Tables present an example of bimodal transcription, semantic and pragmatic skills taxonomies, and the milestones of pragmatic development. (VW)

A preliminary set of principles of judging the pedagogical utility of proposed grammar rules is offered. The goal is the inclusion in teaching materials of only those rules which are linguistically accurate, pedagogically sound, and relevant to specified instructional objectives. (Author)

Demonstrates how a constructivist approach to teacher education helps inexperienced teachers understand learning and teaching of aspect, a core grammatical concept. By consciously experiencing the process of narration, apprentice teachers construct deeper awareness of form/meaning aspectual correlations of the target language. More generally,…

Language can both reflect and shape the way people are treated in today's society. It can be used to open doors when it is gender inclusive, or to create barriers when it is not. The goal of this booklet is to encourage gender-inclusive language. Bias-free language is effective language. A number of studies demonstrate that an audience is more…

A model is proposed for analysis of the patterns of language usage among lawyers. The model accommodates any sample of legal language from any type of legal document and can be applied to lexical and syntactic elements as well as whole documents. One example of legal language is illustrated. (MSE)

Analyzes the omission, overgeneralization, and misuse errors in the compositions of first- through third-year university Spanish students, with major emphasis placed on the role errors play in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. (EKN)

To improve oral communication skills of their students, teachers should provide opportunities for students to talk in class. Teachers are advised to: begin early, be sensitive to the individuality of students' speech patterns, and stress that there are different kinds of speech patterns for different situations. (JDD)

Twenty texts in the Chinese dialect of Shanghai city are presented as a tool for those familiar with some dialect of Chinese who are learning this variety. The texts, recorded as spontaneous speech, were originally collected for grammatical analysis and have been revised somewhat for print form. They are arranged in approximate order of…

This sourcebook is intended to provide researchers and users of natural language computer systems with a classification scheme to describe language-related problems associated with such systems. Methods from the disciplines of artificial intelligence (AI), education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and psychometrics were applied in an…

This document describes how to construct tools for language analysis in research and teaching using the Bourne-shell, sed, and awk, three search tools, in the UNIX operating system. Applications include: searches for words, phrases, grammatical patterns, and phonemic patterns in text; statistical analysis of text in regard to such searches,…

Describes five videotapes drawn from a conference on teacher education. The tapes discuss alternative ways of viewing current problems in reading and language development, the "Breakthrough to Literacy" program developed in Great Britain, language codes, language as a resource, and language as a part of human behavior. (FL)

The intervention described in this article focuses on providing extra spelling instruction to young children who experience difficulty with literacy learning. The CASL Spelling Program is designed to teach children basic sound/letter combinations, spelling patterns involving long and short vowels, and common spelling words that fit these patterns.…

A variety of informal language development assessment tools is presented for use with children with developmental disabilities. This book is written as a manual for clinicians and researchers for evaluating children who cannot meet the cognitive, perceptual, or motor requirements of standardized tests and to help evaluate aspects of language not…

This computer program, a mechanization of the handsorted techniques which geographical dialectology has been using, increases the number of hypotheses that can be explored and the various correlations that can be made. It can draw several of the kinds of maps that dialectologists have used in direct atlases. The hardware, software, and program…

A discussion of discourse patterns in the professional interactions of lawyers and physicians suggests that these encounters are programmatic exchanges to which the psycholinguistic rules of processing and inference can be applied. In these professions, the constraints of normal discourse patterns interact with the conventions of giving and…