Both the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams and the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights show the power of language as vehicles for message. Using them in class as exercises to look at language and meaning will help students understand the importance of connotation and grammar; the use and validity of sources; and the…

A study examined a form of other-initiated repair which occurs later than next turn, a form which is produced by nonnative speakers of English whose native language is Mandarin. Data consists of transcriptions of naturally occurring conversations from 12 native speaker-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) dyads, friends who ordinarily chat. Conversational…

In the book, "Talking from 9 to 5," Deborah Tannen suggests that females have difficulty listening to males in the workplace because of the masculine inclination to talk sports the majority of the time. Men use sports idioms, metaphors, and cliches, making business a "peculiar language" which excludes "naive"…

This survey of languages of the world begins with a chart of about 500 languages, organized in 21 language families. Within each family are listed subgroups and the major and minor languages within those subgroups. The chart is followed by a brief description of each language family. This in turn is followed by individual descriptions of the more…

Of the bilinguals in the United States, 22 million are Spanish-English speakers. Spanish-English bilinguals have been producing literature in Spanish, in English, and gradually in mixtures of both languages from the earliest days of contact in the U.S. This paper explores manifestations and meanings of Spanish-English bilingualism in Latino…

This study tracked the language preference of three French/English bilingual children, twin girls aged 12.8 and a boy 14.8, over a five year period. Their parents, who are also the authors, actively worked to raise them bilingual. The girls were enrolled in a school French immersion program throughout the study. Their brother had only one semester…

The "Ebonics Resolution" was passed by the Oakland, California, school board in 1996. The proposal called for "imparting instruction to African-American students for the combined purposes of maintaining legitimacy and richness of such language...and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills." The…

Over the past 2 decades, a shift has taken place in the language of education. The most prominent semantic marker of this shift is the increase in the use of the word learning and the subsequent decrease in the use of the word education. This short paper contends that the very language educators use to speak and write about education makes certain…

This paper asserts that uses of a tongue other than one's own can reveal unexpected ways of dealing with the cross-cultural clashes that second language learners encounter as they migrate between languages. It notes that learners' appropriation of foreign languages enables them to construct linguistic and cultural identities in the interstices of…

This paper presents model reading and writing standards that express what each student in Colorado should know and be able to do in order to become fluent readers, writers and speakers; be able to communicate effectively; recognize the power of language; and be at ease communicating in an increasingly technological world. The six standards in the…

Language is a child's major tool for learning about the world. This book presents a naturalistic case study of one child's use of language from two-and-a-half to five years, drawing on systemic functional theory to argue that cognitive development is essentially a linguistic process and offering a new description and interpretation of linguistic…

In educational research the problem of student description is eternal. On what basis do researchers make decisions about aspects of students' material lives to count as data, interpretive categories, contextual information, results? This paper focuses specifically on the problem of "background" in researching the student subject. The…

Data from the last two U.S. decennial censuses provide an estimate of the bilingual population. In the 1990 and 2000 censuses, respondents (or parents of children) were asked whether they speak a language other than English at home and, if they do, how well they speak English. Although the data do not reveal how well respondents read and write…

This textbook aims to set forth the elements of English grammar in their relation to thought and the expression of thought. This object has been the guiding principle in the selection and arrangement of material, in the treatment of forms and constructions, and in the fashioning of the very numerous illustrative exercises. The Introduction…

Concludes that as long as there are critical minds in charge of dangerous elements having unfathomed properties, such as language and politics, there is little chance that the members of the human race will wholesale themselves into slavery. (Author/RB)