Argues the importance of dictated stories, with the teacher or other adult as scribe, in children's development as writers. Examines one child's literary influences and her literacy development. (MG)

A bilingual instructional program was developed to teach written English to elementary-aged deaf students who are fluent in American Sign Language. The student-directed language learning uses interactive video and offers five activity options: watch a story, read a story, answer questions about a story, write a story, or caption a story.…

Suggestions for helping students learn to write in a foreign language are offered. Areas for the teacher to consider include recognizing students' basic needs, rewarding risks that students take, listening for content before correcting, introducing vocabulary and usage, and writing with the students. (12 references) (LB)

This article presents a rationale and ways to use communication games in written form to entice deaf children to try new forms of language. It emphasizes the importance of using communicative teaching methods and considering students' communicative adequacy rather than form. Games include picture/object matching games and bingo/lotto games. (JDD)

Suggests that because the new methodological emphasis in intermediate-level foreign-0language courses has shifted from translation-based learning, which utilized literary texts extensively, to communication-based learning, literature has been overlooked as a viable tool of instruction. Argues that this shift does not allow students to develop an…

Four classes of bilingual children from Grades 3 and 5, speakers of Spanish and Nahuatl, participated in a study of literacy development focused on interlinguistic transfer and the application of narrative schemata as seen in writing samples produced in both languages. Reports on a methodological approach seen to be effective in eliciting…

This book remains a comprehensive, myth-debunking examination of how L1 features (orthographic system, phonology, morphology) can influence English L2 reading at the "bottom" of the reading process. It provides a thorough but very accessible linguistic/psycholinguistic examination of the lowest levels of the reading process. It is both theoretical…

This report on machine translation contains a brief history of the field; a description of the processes involved; a discussion of systems currently in use, including three software packages on the market (Teaching Assistant, Translate, and Globalink); reflections on implications for teaching; observations of results obtained when elements of…

This report presents ideas on the use of poetry in teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Chapter 1 describes beliefs about language and language learning, and offers a theoretical justification for including the reading and writing of poetry in the language classroom. Chapter 2 is a collection of poetry activities that have been…

This study was conducted to determine the effect that hands-on, creative activity using the Language Experience Approach would have on language usage in students' written stories. Twenty-five fifth grade students were randomly divided into three sample groups. Sample A received hands-on, creative stimulus and art materials; Sample B looked at and…

Personal observations as a writing instructor, combined with the findings of many experts, point to the fact that all children need to learn and internalize a "writing process" in order to master composition on an adequate level. Learning disabled children, who may possess several processing difficulties, have severe deficits to overcome…

Typically, teachers approach ambiguity in student writing by suggesting that students focus on diction, syntax, and writing format; however, the works of modernists (including T.S. Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Marx, and Pablo Picasso) suggest the importance of conceptions of semantic clarity. Transformational models for syntactic elements in…

The purpose of this book is to encourage a more serious study of spelling by discussing it as both a skill and a problem and by highlighting some previously ill-understood processes involved in learning to spell. The 22 chapters are arranged under the following eight categories: spelling instruction and spelling reform, spelling and language,…

The emphasis in the essays printed here is on the problems students face in writing and the problems teachers face in helping their students to improve. The contents include: "New and Renewed Rhetorics: Implications for Teaching,""Experience in Awareness, an Introduction to Creative Writing,""An Experiment with Christensen's 'Rhetoric of the…

Black English Vernacular (BEV) is spoken in more or less pure form by many, if not most, of the inner-city students attending college under plans like open enrollment. In cities, most blacks, Puerto Ricans, and many other non-native speakers speak or can speak a form of BEV. The prevalence of BEV in elementary and secondary schools of the inner…