A study investigated patterns of usage of "can" and "may" (e.g., "May/Can I go to the bathroom?") among native speakers and non-native speakers of English. A questionnaire was administered to 25 native English-speakers, most aged 19-26 and the remainder over age 45, and 56 non-native speakers taking advanced…

A study comparing the dialects of Ozark and Appalachian English addresses a possible relationship between the two dialects. The study compares selected structures in the two dialects in order to (1) examine similarities and differences, (2) investigate the behavior of a range of ages (10-70+) to determine patterns of change, (3) examine…

The hypothesis that professional writers would be judged superior to college students on both holistic and analytic evaluations was only partially confirmed when four teacher-evaluators rated the anonymously submitted compositions of 64 college students and 5 professional writers. On the holistic scale the professionals did not distinguish…

In this study, a comparison was made between the achievement scores in English usage of students who were assigned English classes during their last two years of high school and the scores of students who elected English classes. The 667 participants in this study were members of the 1970 and 1972 graduating classes at Aviation High School,…

A representative sampling of the career of one man concerned with learners, teachers and with English is presented. In "So What Good is English," is demonstrated how both language and literature play vital roles in the designs of man and in man's designs; the importance of communication is demonstrated for even the most menial tasks in life; the…

A measure of standard English (SE) performance was administered to children from ten culture/language groups in the Western United States. The results of the test indicate that elementary school children from a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds experience difficulty with the same SE grammatical features. (Author/AM)

This study tests the hypothesis that the terms Chicano and black are more acceptable among public than among parochial school students. It also determines if widespread acceptance of these terms is real or apparent and if there are differences in terms of school systems, sex, or socioeconomic status. (Author/AM)

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)

Shows that sixth-grade students did not use as much oral language for forecasting and reasoning as did third-grade students or students in kindergarten when their language was recorded under similar conditions. Suggests that perhaps the very process of schooling inhibits students' need to think creatively and to reason. (FL)

A study of the first grade books in two basal series, compared with typical storybooks, shows that the amount and type of picture-dependence varies, even over the year. (FL)

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…

A study examined what a third grader might understand about composing a common genre like the narrative, given the degree of variance among approaches and experience. Data were collected from different school sites over a period of several years. These sites shared common geographical areas: three schools were located in the Sonoran desert shared…

Considers school writing situations in comparison with speech situations. Discusses the responses of five Australian high school girls to questions about writing v speaking. (RL)

When 20 highly talkative and 20 much less talkative preschool children were measured for articulation, grammar, receptive syntax, and sentence repetition, the performances of the highly talkative children were significantly superior on all measures. (Author/RL)