The contrast between written language and oral language did not really begin to attract attention until second language teaching defined as its goal the acquisition of a communicative tool rather than a literary tool. This focus on communication made necessary the distinction between language used for oral communication and language used for…

This is a study of linguistic variability among social levels in West Germany and of the problems associated with doing such an analysis. The data, ordered according to sex and social levels, were collected from young children retelling narratives heard on tapes. The report represents a comprehensive study of the children's syntactic performance…

The purpose of this paper is to present a general overview of the linguistic setting of Arabic. Three main areas are covered. The first of these, diglossia, is defined in general terms and then examined more closely in relation to its historical development in Arabic-speaking countries (i.e., as resulting from geographic, socioeconomic, and…

This selective bibliography lists 8 books and 19 journal articles dealing with contrastive studies of African languages and English. The entries range in date from 1953 to 1972 with the majority published since 1965. The books cited are African and British publications and the articles appeared in well-known African, European or American…

A three-year study of the linguistic and metalinguistic performance of forty Mexican-American children ranging in age from three to eleven years shows that it is useful to characterize the competence of the bilingual in terms of a unified system of rules, at least at one level of analysis. This paper explores some aspects of the grammatical…

This paper describes a pilot program in an integrated media presentation of foreign languages and the production and usage of seven computer-generated video tapes which demonstrate various aspects of French syntax. This instructional set could form the basis for CAI lessons in which the student is presented images identical to those on the video…

This paper examines the factors which govern the use of infinitives and gerunds after verbs and uses American literature and periodicals since 1945 for examples of this usage. The analysis was undertaken in order to clarify this usage for those teaching or learning English as a second language. Studies yielded three general rules for the use of…

This textbook attempts to augment the general handbook information needed in any composition class with specific information that the non-native speaker needs, for example, the distribution of determiners with the various noun subclasses, and the syntactical relationship of subordinator to subordinate clause; and to apply the techniques and…

An overview of Noam Chomsky's theories about transformational grammar and phonology is given. Since Chomsky was interested in characterizing what it is to know a language, the ways in which we demonstrate knowledge of our native language are discussed in detail. Particular emphasis is placed on describing how the transformational approach actually…

This syllabus was designed to serve as the instructor's manual for courses in the teaching of German offered to elementary and secondary teachers in Texas. The material presented is divided into the following parts: (1) introduction to linguistics and phonetics and phonemics, (2) teaching pronunciation and pronunciation drills, and (3) grammar and…

Harold Allen states that language study will become an integral component of the college English curriculum when English departments recognize that a professional knowledge of the nature and function of language, of current theoretical studies in it, and of the geographical, historical, and social variations in language is vital to understanding…

The present level of understanding of the psycholinguistic processes and capacities underlying the child's acquisition of language is reviewed in this publication. In the first chapter, linguistic theories, biological characteristics of language learning, and the distinctions between language competence and language performance are discussed. The…

In an attempt to apply recent developments in transformational grammar to Latin syntax, this report analyzes first English, then Latin sentences for both deep and surface structures through transformational and phrase structure grammar methods. Auxiliary nodes, problems of Latin verb complimentation, and the gerund and gerundive constructions are…

As the result of an analysis and synthesis of reading comprehension skills studies, it was suggested that teachers attempt to simplify comprehension questions by recognizing two basic types: literal and nonliteral. It was noted that a student's success in obtaining meaning depends on (1) his competency in determining word meaning, (2) his…

An analysis of part-of-speech membership was made utilizing certain mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the nature of word classes. It was proposed that words of the same form class constitute "verbal habit families" on the basis of either a common grammatical meaning response, a common affix, or a common label (e.g., "verb"). One…