A group of students on a post-graduate teacher training course took part in a Reluctant Learner Project. On one afternoon a week for a term, each student took a small group of comprehensive school pupils from a low stream class out of school and engaged in mutually agreed activities. (Editor)

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

In early transformational generative grammar, it was assumed that all semantic interpretation would be done off deep structure, but with the proposals for the extended standard theory (EST) of Chomsky (1968, 1972) came the realization that certain aspects of semantic interpretation, such as focus and presuppostion and scope of quantifiers, must be…

This study manipulated the relations between target and cue words in two cued-recall experiments with children based on the assumptions that: (1) the target cue relations that are most consistent with a child's semantic memory organization result in the highest levels of recall, and that (2) the optimal target-cue relationships may change with…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…

A general observation about the vocabularies of most languages is that they tend to increase in size over time. Little is known about the causal mechanisms involved in this lexical expansion, but most anthropologists and linguists are in agreement that it probably mirrors general cultural evolution. The study of lexical growth becomes important if…

An attempt is made to overcome the shortcomings in Robinson's model of generative grammar by modifying her dependency rules and adding semantic specifications to the dependents of V, taking into account some of the considerations that led Fillmore to make up his cases. (Author)

A definition of the original meaning of "audiolingual," as coined by the author in the 1950s, with a plea for the reinstatement of that meaning. Classroom procedures based on the original concept are offered. (TL)

Proposes a methodology for teaching comprehension of a foreign language in both the reading and the listening domains. (Text is in French.) (TL)

The first part of this paper presents a set of principles that constitute a theory of lexical meaning. The second part considers the implications of the theory for the teaching of English vocabulary in foreign or second language classrooms. (CLK)

Discusses the role of illustrations used to clarify the meaning of dialogues in instruction in French as a second language. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The arguments for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as holophrases are reviewed. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the speech act as the basic unit of linguistic communication, rather than the sentence, is offered as a solution to the holophrase controversy. (Author/RM)

The document contains papers of seven research studies conducted by graduate students at the Speech and Hearing Center of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Queens College of the City University of New York. Papers have the following titles and authors: "Assessing Pragmatic Functioning in Language Disordered Children" (K.…