Discusses a whole-language approach to teaching guided reading to deaf students. Each morning, a written letter, using vocabulary and syntax in accordance with students' reading ability, previews the day's events. With teacher guidance, students explore their reading skills in groups to encourage application of reading strategies in a natural…

Discusses the feasibility of Basic Variety (BV) principles proposed by Klein and Perdue, arguing that some of them need clarification with learner varieties and that they are not part of Universal Grammar (UG) as they exclude phenomena (e.g., psych verbs) that cannot be excluded from the core of natural language. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses how computer-assisted language learning programs can generate error messages to help students in different ways. The article points out that an easier solution is to program a computer to recognize several different kinds of generic errors not related to any particular question but applicable to many situations, in order to generate…

Describes an undergraduate course at the Open University in Great Britain that teaches software engineering. Highlights include the use of formal methods to interpret the programing language's syntax and semantics; the role of course software; home use of microcomputers for the course; and supporting course materials. (LRW)

Describes a list of attributes of instructional materials based on a review of instructional design literature that was validated and found reliable through a series of studies. Four categories of attributes are presented: (1) instructional design; (2) language, including semantic and syntactic structures; (3) presentation, including layout; and…

Important characteristics of lexical databases and their applications in information retrieval and natural language processing are explained. An ongoing project using various machine-readable sources to build a lexical database is described, and detailed designs of individual entries with examples are included. (Contains 66 references.) (EAM)

Discusses second language acquisition and the use of multimedia that allows learners to be actively engaged in the language learning process, based on experiences at an Australian university teaching Chinese to English and Japanese students. Considers the phonological level, the semantic level, the syntactic level, and the discourse level. (LRW)

Describes a language generation system, which, given data files describing a natural language, generates utterances of the class the user has specified. The system can exercise control over the syntax, lexicon, morphology, and semantics of the language. This article explores a range of the system's potential applications to second-language…

In this article, the author stresses the importance of welcoming preschoolers and babies into school libraries. She states that when read to from birth, a baby becomes used to the cadences and rhythms of spoken language, at the same time responding to the bright pictures and the presence of a loving adult. The baby associates books and stories…

The present article examines one property of bilingual speech--convergence--and strives towards explanatory depth by attending to the insights of the antecedent research in formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. In particular, the paper adopts as a point of departure (and further substantiates) the argument that convergence…

Down syndrome is the most prevalent cause of intellectual impairment associated with a genetic anomaly, in this case, trisomy of chromosome 21. It affects both physical and cognitive development and produces a characteristic phenotype, although affected individuals vary considerably with respect to severity of specific impairments. Studies…

A 2-year project to develop a dictionary of modern Nepali is described. The Nepali-English dictionary was designed to include high-frequency vocabulary and to treat entries thoroughly, including associated collocations, semantic and/or grammatical restrictions, and other information essential to their use in sentences. Contents include 3,642 main…

One way to make it possible for students to write intelligible composition in a foreign language is to provide them with a knowledge and understanding of the bilingual dictionary at the beginning of the composition course. A unit on dictionary usage is presented that was designed for use with students in a third-year college Spanish composition…

Outlines some applications of Natural Language Processing, the capacity of computers to process human language, to language teaching. The role of syntactic parsing (the assigning of grammatical structure to sentences by computer) and semantically based processing is examined. (Author/SED)

Supports claim that linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts based on study of English may prove unreliable as guides to sentence processing in even closely related languages such as German and Italian. Results of a test of sentence interpretation indicate that English-speaking Americans rely overwhelmingly on word order, Germans rely on both…