A sample of 75 teacher education students participating in a speech proficiency test was used to investigate the relationship between speech proficiency and self-concept. The students took the Tennessee Self Concept Scale after being divided into the following three groups: students judged satisfactory on the speech proficiency test, students…

The belief that bilinguals are an asset to their country is not held by most bilinguals today, much less the general public. This paper describes on-going research into the discovery that many bilinguals conceal their linguistic skill in the home language when in an English-speaking environment, passing as English-speaking monolinguals. Data are…

This paper describes an experiment in which the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure, which has been used successfully for scoring sentence complexity in child language, was examined for its usefulness when applied to adult learners of English as a Second Language. The technique is based upon a developmental scale of syntax acquisition within…

Public hearings were held to assess citizens' views about providing bilingual education for preschool children in California. Contents of this report, consisting of six brief papers, discuss the value of early bilingual education, the assessment of bilingual proficiency in young children, and preschool curriculum design. Parent participation,…

This paper reports on a study comparing oral English proficiency as conventionally measured by instruments currently used in many school districts throughout the United States, with Spanish language abilities of individuals with Spanish language background. Oral language proficiency is defined as the results of a quantitative measure applied to a…

An in-progress research project evaluating the first phase of two-year bilingual exchange programs is described. The exchange programs being evaluated are a summer exchange between groups of school children from schools in Quebec and Ontario and a school-year exchange between groups of children from schools in the same provinces. The objectives of…

As part of an investigation of ways to increase the linguistic awareness and communication skills of community college students from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, a study was conducted to determine if poetry study would enhance the word comprehension sensitivity of bilingual and bidialectal students. The 38 students involved in…

Both the 1945 and the 1950 constitutions of the Republic of Indonesia are presented in Bahasa Indonesian as part of the basic language course in Indonesian. The volume is used daily for reading comprehension practice during the final weeks of the third phase of the course. Comparing these constitutions enables students to comprehend the course of…

A study designed to assess the concurrent validity of the Home Bilingual Usage Estimate (which measures the amount of language spoken) in relation to the Dos Amigos Verbal Language Scale (which measures the quality of language spoken) was conducted with a sample of Spanish-surnamed exceptional children from a lower-middle class elementary school…

This study examined the characteristics of declared education majors and compared them to students who majored in other fields. Specific comparisons were made between the two groups: (1) biographical characteristics (age and sex) and academic abilities (grade point average and English competency); (2) psychological characteristics; (3) university…

This study identifies the problems and needs of recent immigrants to Hawaii, identifies those factors that hinder the effective delivery of Federally funded health, educational, and social services to immigrants, and recommends ways in which government agencies can meet immigrant needs in Hawaii. The study is based on a 1978 survey in which…

The perceptions of an administrator embroiled for several years in the language issue in Quebec are briefly summarized in this paper. Before the first legislation concerning language (Bill 63) was passed, it became clear that in spite of the fact that Quebec was the home for a large number of French immigrants, French language and culture were in…

Dictations are not sufficient as exercises for developing listening comprehension skills. Other techniques and exercises which have been used in English for Special Purposes classes include practice in note taking, cloze-testing on lectures, mock formal interviews and informal conversations, and discourse analyses of sample lectures. Such analyses…

This handbook for teachers of Asian immigrants at the elementary and secondary level presents in a straightforward manner, in outline form, information of use to teachers who must work with limited-English-speakinq children from an Asian cultural background. The manners, school behavior, and parent-teacher relationships of Asian students are…

This diagnostic instrument was developed for use with non-English-speakinq adult students. Four tests measure listening comprehension and oral proficiency at four levels of English proficiency. The Level One test assesses the student's ability to identify specific vocabulary items; no oral response is necessary. Survival vocabulary and the ability…