Part of the Grade Teacher Special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts.

Two guides are presented to assist in organization of a thematic approach to instruction in French and Spanish that is helpful in integrating language and culture. Each booklet contains the following elements: (1) a general introduction to the factors that must be present in the teaching situation for real communication to take place, and to…

This collection of research on curriculum and program development in languages for special purposes (LSP) contains the following papers: (1) "LSP Curriculum Development--From Policy to Practice," by Ronald Mackay and Maryse Bosquet; (2) "The Problem of Needs Assessment in English for Specific Purposes: Some Theoretical and Practical…

Dialogs are an effective tool for language acquisition and for transmission of cultural material. Much of the apparent confusion about how they should be used in the language classroom results from a failure to distinguish the ages and levels of proficiency of those for whom the dialogs are designed. The great advantage that dialogs have over…

This study assesses an analytical process which seeks to describe the writing style of a student in terms of the four basic transformational operations: addition, deletion, combining, and reordering. Application of the process to writing skills of low achievers in English is evaluated. All ninth and eleventh grade students in the Falls Church,…

Discusses the differences in conversational structures and verbal strategies between languages and cultures and the teaching of such differences. The use of literary texts is advocated. (AM)

Four ideas for language classroom activities are presented, including an exercise in oral discourse analysis, a newspaper-reading activity using the holistic approach, the use of slight phonological changes to turn a title into a joke or play on words, and an exercise looking at varieties of language style. (MSE)

Paulo Freire's revolutionary theory of pedagogy has influenced progressive educational practice and inspired educational activism around the world. Many contemporary nonformal educational efforts are deeply influenced by Freire's work. In Latin America approaches that draw on Freire's pedagogy are broadly known as popular education, while in the…

References and scenes from literature that portray objectively the social elements and patterns of a culture are recommended to teach readers about typical situations and modes of behavior. This is a way of introducing the reader not only to common sociocultural patterns, but also to the cultural traits peculiar to situations that are…

Members of the Polish faculty at the English Institute (Poland) primarily use English as a second language (ESL) techniques to teach writing, with grammar and idiom drills, and little writing beyond the sentence level. An American professor, on the other hand, used a process approach to teach writing by providing specific instructions about…

A stylistics-based approach to teaching poetry in the English as a foreign language classroom is examined. Since students may not have the linguistic skills to appreciate a poem, an analytical framework is proposed that includes the elements of repetition, confusion, and surprise. Reference is made to two poems, "In a Season of Unemployment"…

The eight articles in this journal issue deal with the classroom study of language. They address such topics as dealing with student dialects and teaching about dialects; creating environments in which "languaging" can take place; using stylistic analysis to explain a literary text; teaching high school students to write research papers on aspects…

Children's speech styles vary considerably, ranging along a continuum from formal to informal, in the various educational and social settings they encounter in school. Teachers who see their role as preparing children to fill social roles will be aware of the speech styles that children use and will accept varying speech styles as appropriate to…

This paper reviews relevant experimental literature on certain components of printed instructional materials which are commonly used in early childhood education for normal, at-risk, and handicapped children. The components examined include the use of color, instances of concepts, language style, number of answer options, the use of pictures and…

The reading habits by which students formulate a critical analysis of a literary work should focus attention on the choices that a writer makes when putting words on paper. These choices include sound, diction, language, imagery, organization, metaphors, sentence structure, transitions, allusions, and patterns. Discussing these choices does not…