A study investigated the distribution of post-vocalic /r/ in Singapore English as it may relate to social factors, particularly whether usage appears to be perceived as a prestige feature by those who use it. Informants were 21 subjects from various social backgrounds. Three speech styles representing a range of stylistic variation were elicited:…

According to the linguistic theory of "natural order," eight English morphemes have been ranked in an invariant order of difficulty for learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Pedagogical implications of this theory have led to the "natural approach" as a comprehensive second language teaching methodology. A case study that suggests the…

A study examined whether language patterns found in English, which differed from those in Spanish, would have a significant effect on English as a second language (ESL) learners' comprehension while reading English text. Average fifth grade readers were randomly assigned to either an initial Spanish speaking group (N=18) or an initial English…

Evidence from the language use of young children is used to question accepted notions of language development and instruction in the three papers in this compilation. The first paper, "Young Children Challenge the Belief That Language Needs to be Taught Sequentially," challenges the notion of sequential development in which oral language…

The paper examines interpretive aspects of English non-uniformity among fifth and sixth grade Native Americans at Laguna Elementary School, Laguna, New Mexico. Speaker assessments of instances of uninflected "be" are ordered to form an implicational scale. The variability in the students' assessment pattern is compared to previous inter-ethnic…

This report deals with sporadic observations on the glottal stop in the English spoken by Finns. The data were collected in connection with two separate studies. An attempt is made to give a description of the factors which may explain the occurrence of glottalization and to outline the method by which the phenomenon will be approached in greater…

The shift from viewing reading as primarily a perceptual process to viewing it as primarily a linguistic process, combined with the consideration of reading failure as not one but many disabilities, formed the basis for the assumption that there exists a duo-symbiosis between reading and speech and between speech and word-finding. The development…

Proposals for changing sexist language, while having an increasing impact on patterns of language usage in America, have also continuously been argued against in the media and in academia during the 1970's. The proposals for eliminatinq the usage of masculine terms as "generics" have received the most criticism. In this paper, the various…

Parallels between processes in society and in language are drawn in this analysis of problems involved in eliminating sexism in language. The paper is organized as follows: varieties of sexism in language are outlined; the linguistic notion of marking is applied to the sexist structures; psychological aspects of such marking are considered;…

To assist language researchers in their analysis of interlanguage, some values for the linguistic variables of Source Language (SL), Interlanguage (IL), and Target Language (TL) are set forth. Although the fundamental assumption underlying interlanguage research is that interlanguages are linguistic systems, it is difficult to describe the…

THIS REPORT DESCRIBES IN DETAIL FIVE RELATED EXPERIMENTS THAT WERE CONDUCTED IN AREAS PERTAINING TO THE TEACHING OF FRENCH PRONUNCIATION TO NATIVE SPEAKERS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH. THE FIRST TWO EXPERIMENTS SOUGHT TO DETERMINE THE RELATIVE ACCEPTABILITY OF 38 ENGLISH PHONEMES TO NATIVE FRENCH LISTENERS AT EACH OF TWO ACCEPTABILITY LEVELS--PHONEMIC AND…

A pilot study was conducted as part of a larger sociological investigation of small group interaction. Specifically, the study dealt with communication in three first-grade advanced reading groups, each composed of 15 children, and focused on two types of requests: those for action and those for information. Student interactions were audio- and…

This paper argues: (1) that one of the major syntactic constraints adopted by many proponents of the Extended Standard Theory, namely the Specified Subject Condition (SSC), is empirically inadequate with respect to "unbounded" extraction phenomena; and (2) that the unbounded extraction data which the SSC purported to account for need to be…

This is a reflection on certain aspects of sociolinguistic and linguistic problems of French in West Africa, particularly in Senegal and the Ivory Coast. The sociolinguistic section discusses the role French has played in Africa and still plays vis-a-vis African languages and English. Conditions in which French is used and attitudes both of…

Research indicates that first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition involve some of the same processes, yet L2 learners apparently acquire the structures of the target language in a systematic way by passing through a sequence of developmental stages. This study shows that in the earliest stages of syntactic development the L2 learner's…