In response to the need of local schools for assistance in introducing language study at the elementary and junior high school level, Tarrant County (Texas) Junior College (TCJC), Northeast Campus, designed a 5-week program in language development and methodology for prospective teachers that was designed primarily to develop skills in oral…

Discourse is basically interactive. This is clear in conversation, but the concept can be extended to written language. Written text can be analyzed as spoken discourse. The methodology of English text studies has adhered too much to a textual approach and even extended it to spoken data. Another approach would be to begin with the spoken form of…

The oral interaction examination used by Britain's Royal Society of Arts for testing communicative use of English as a foreign language is described. The underlying principles of the test, its structure, administration, issues of reliability and validity, and scoring are outlined. Three components of the test itself are included. One component is…

Early speech-act theorists studied isolated speech acts, often in terms of single sentences invented by the investigator, an approach that had obvious limitations. It is now known that speech acts ought to be investigated by looking at utterances in their full interactional context. A hierarchical model of the structure of conversation that is…

Intended to serve as a model to aid school districts in developing and reviewing their language arts curricula, this curriculum guide for the elementary grades lists in parallel columns topics/concepts, learning outcomes, and sample learning objectives for language skills in the areas of oral communication, reading, and writing. Topics and…

Intended to serve as a model to aid school districts as they develop and review their language arts curricula, this curriculum guide for secondary school lists in parallel columns topics/concepts, learning outcomes, and sample learning objectives for language skills in the areas of oral communication, reading, and writing. Topics and concepts…

To investigate the rhetorical relations between oral and written texts in adolescents' academic discourse, a study examined oral and written language samples of three high school juniors in a San Francisco area middle class suburban community (two males and one female) participating in an English literature class. Discourse analytic techniques…

One of a series of Parallel Alternative Strategies for Students (PASS) packages developed to provide Florida teachers with modified approaches for presenting content courses to mainstreamed exceptional students, this guide was designed as a supplementary text and workbook for a high school English course. The guide is divided into eight units of…

The increasing interest in oral proficiency during the past decade prompted Educational Testing Service (ETS) to undertake the development of the Test of Spoken English (TSE), a standardized test of speaking proficiency of non-native speakers of English. The test has been validated for the selection of non-native teaching assistants applying to…

A 1-day orientation workshop for business clients from other cultures is described. Factors in program design that relate to the specific cultural group addressed are discussed, and include such considerations as culture-specific versus culture-general content, professional focus, and the learning style to which the participants are accustomed.…

The National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs (NASILP) offers a program option for institutions that lack the resources to develop a regular second language program but want to offer instruction in a broad range of languages for international businesses. The cost-effective, media-intensive approach consists of a controlled…

A study investigated the process of learning French by Chinese students, as revealed by student errors in 48 compositions and 33 oral reports. Grammatical, or competency, errors were categorized by type and frequency. Analysis of the results shows the most frequent errors to be, in declining order of occurrence: in the use of articles; choice of…

This second edition of a text has been organized into a sequence that reflects how students learn language--from listening and speaking to reading and writing. The book begins with an overview of the language arts and the teacher's role in planning instruction. Chapters 2 and 3, "Listening to Learn" and "Developing Oral…

This book is intended for researchers and teachers interested in literacy and concerned about classrooms as a context for literacy activity and learning. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "What It Means to be Literate about Classrooms" (Lyn Corno); (2) "Beyond Access: An Ethnographic Study of Reading and Writing in a…

Representing a first attempt by English teachers in Scotland to address a professional mandate that they teach and assess the modes of talking and listening, this booklet outlines both the scope and the details of an oral/aural syllabus. The eight chapters in the booklet cover the following areas: (1) the oral syllabus--principles and approaches;…