Presents examples of unintentional humor from college freshman composition courses. Suggests that by pointing out miscommunications, teachers can persuade students to use standard English more effectively. (MM)

A cultural perspective is applied to modern popular songs that encourages listeners to use a critical ear and consider not only the songs themselves, but also how they fit into the broadcast industry's schema. Different song types and industry patterns of song exploitation are considered. (MSE)

It is argued that dictation is a neglected technique for second-language training. Students' error patterns at three levels are presented to show how the technique can be used effectively for both teaching and testing, and to develop integrative skills and accuracy in both listening and writing. (Author/MSE)

Outlines a program of vocabulary development that contains cognitive, affective, and physical elements. Points to test results showing that the program has been effective with fourth grade students. (FL)

Discusses "cued shadowing," during which subjects listen to pairs of words or sentences and repeat a target word signalled by a cue. Rapid semantic and grammatical priming effects have been observed with this technique, both with word and sentence contexts and at different positions within sentence contexts, in normal children and adults, and in…

Describes the different priming procedures and experimental variables used for gaining access to the nature of the lexical representation of morphological information and summarizes the experimental data collected across different languages. Notes that responses to a target word in auditory word recognition tasks can be facilitated when the word…

In 1987, as a vehicle for improving student performance, Moss Point (Mississippi) Schools embraced semantic or cognitive mapping. Using highly structured computer programs, students learn to construct visual maps representing the relationships of major ideas, subordinate ideas, and explicit information. Includes six references. (MLH)

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 how students can use the computer to study and create clone poems (altering original Spanish-language poems by substituting words and expressions), and how students can gain a deeper appreciation of the original poem's poetic structure and semantics. (CB)

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…

Describes the development of a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) by the National Library of Medicine that will retrieve and integrate information from a variety of information resources. Highlights include the metathesaurus; the UMLS semantic network; semantic locality; information sources map; evaluation of the metathesaurus; future…

This empirical study examines the effects of visible link-types on learning in a hypertext environment. Learning outcomes and learning processes of two groups, one using visible link-types and one not using them, are compared; results of an attitude questionnaire are discussed; further research is suggested; and the questionnaire is appended. (LRW)

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…