Doublespeak can be defined as language which is purposely ambiguous, deceptive, or evasive. If we want to promote integrity between act and word, we must teach by living out of the kind of consistency which we hope for in others. Functioning honestly in departmental and pedagogical as well as other personal dealings can be the most effective thing…

A shift from a classroom focus on persuasion and argumentation to a broader classroom focus on the communication of controversy might be beneficial to students. The course content should help students come to grips with their internal and external problems, rather than avoid them and seek only quick solutions. To aid students in dealing with…

The major purpose of this study was to contrast the responses of three groups of subjects to a language attitude questionnaire focusing on non-mainstream language patterns. The three groups were writers in the area of sociolinguistics, students who were enrolled in an experimental sociolinguistic-oriented instructional module, and students…

This volume contains nine papers presented at a discussion session on language planning at the 1972 Georgetown University Round Table. Papers by Bjorn H. Jernudd and Joan Rubin emphsize language planning as only one kind of treatment for language problems. Aaron Bar-Adon and T. P. Gorman discuss language treatment activities, indicating that local…

This book considers the right and the wrong ways to approach different types of novels. Trollope's "The Way We Live Now" is the starting point for chapters dealing with the conventions of realism as they are revealed in the presentation of characters, in the novelists' language, and in the tension between the autonomy of character and the demands…

Any theory of language acquisition must take into account the actual speech heard by children during the acquisition period. When 8 well-educated mothers were tape-recorded talking to their daughters, ages 16 to 30 months, it was found that their speech differed significantly from that spoken to another adult. The mothers used a more restricted…

This study of written language development and instruction of elementary school children found that realistic approaches are needed in teaching language usage, dialects, and registers. These approaches should include a nonrepetitive instructional system accounting for different linguistic abilities, a diagnostic evaluation of children's written…

Roger Shuy and Ralph Fasold's introduction describing sociolinguistics as (1) a desire to refine linguistic theory, (2) an attempt to describe the sociocultural matrices of language, and (3) an effort to apply sociolinguistic knowledge to this monograph. Walt Wolfram contributes substantially to the development of sociolinguistics theory in…

The author reports on an investigation of the variations in total verbal output and in verbal variety noted from interview responses of eighteen persons, each involved with a specific issue or topic at one of three levels. He defines the levels as: (1) observer, or someone who is aware of the issue but passive about it; (2) participant, or one who…

A representative sampling of the career of one man concerned with learners, teachers and with English is presented. In "So What Good is English," is demonstrated how both language and literature play vital roles in the designs of man and in man's designs; the importance of communication is demonstrated for even the most menial tasks in life; the…

The book represents oral communication as a wide spectrum of speech events ranging from daily perfunctory comments to highly structured, formal speeches. The introductory chapter summarizes various approaches to the study of the communication process. The subsequent chapters present: (1) elements of communication language structure, language…

This article investigates a specific foreign language (FL) learning problem, the substitution of /s,z/ for English unvoiced and voiced "th" by native speakers of Egyptian Arabic, and concludes that the facts are better explained in terms of language transfer than by an explanation in terms of inherent difficulty independent of native…

This paper discusses the results of part of an ongoing project studying an aspect of real world language usage, the comprehension of standard jury instructions. Problems in the comprehension of these instructions include the memory load that they impose, the fact that most instructions are read only once, and the fact that instructions are written…

Ten contributors provide extensive bibliographic essays on topics of importance in the teaching of college composition. Works cited and commented upon range from those of Aristotle to the contributions of contemporary scholars. Separate essays deal with invention, structure and form in nonfiction prose, approaches to the study of style, modes of…

The purposes of this handbook are to assist teachers in examining a number of concerns regarding the expression of sexism in language and literature and to provide some suggestions for coping with these problems in the classroom. The first section, devoted to language, considers stereotyping and role expectations, as well as the following areas of…