Considers marked and unmarked structures in modern Arabic in terms of defending a basic unmarked structure which carries the least presuppositional background to which other surface orders can be related and a lexical treatment of number in Arabic. (CB)

Shows, on empirical grounds, that a verb phrase (VP) is absent in the Arabic sentence structure through specific examination of the language's syntactic property. (CB)

Assessment of writing skills must focus on the writing product to satisfy four educational functions: identifying unsuccessful writers, planning instruction, monitoring student progress, and providing feedback. Both qualitative and quantitative measures for five important aspects of the writing product are discussed: fluency, content, conventions,…

The descriptions of a terrorist attack on a Paris restaurant--an audio recording of a juvenile eyewitness, an audio recording of a researcher reading a text about the event, and a newspaper account--are compared for discourse characteristics. (MSE)

American high-school graduates should be expected to be literate. There is a need to come to an understanding of what literacy is, what its fundamental relationship to education is, and what the responsibilities are to teach it. (MLW)

Provides evidence for the development of grammatical sensitivity across grades one, two, and three. Shows that grammatical sensitivity is significantly related to reading skill level. (FL)

A theory of sentence production is presented that accounts for facts about speech errors, including (1) the kinds of errors that occur; (2) the constraints on their form; and (3) the conditions that precipitate them. Two simulation models are introduced to illustrate how the theory applies to phonological encoding processes. (Author/LMO)

Offers an analytical model to assist teachers and students in decoding social and cultural meaning embedded in the visual track of any given television program. To illustrate the model, the Public Broadcasting System's production of "The Scarlet Letter" is analyzed. (MBR)

Concludes that reader enjoyment is related to both syntactic and semantic unpredictability. (FL)

Offers a practical model for teaching the extended modifier that is economical and linguistically sound, based on the insights and methodology of transformational generative grammar. Five transformational rules are given for generating extended modifiers from relative clauses. Examples of transformations and two class exercises in German are also…

Examines the nonstandard constructions in Caipira Portuguese, a dialect spoken in southeastern Brazil, which illustrate a tendency to reduce morphological redundancy at the noun phrase level. This is accomplished by restricting plural markers to only one of the elements of the noun phrase--not the noun, as might be expected, but, rather, one its…

Discusses the production of anomalous sentences by non-native students of the Japanese language and suggests that the primary cause of various errors indicated in such sentences is the confusion with English "when." In addition, it is suggested that error analysis can help clarify the nature of grammatical problems and facilitate learning of…

Describes a study on the English language use of native speakers of Arabic and Japanese in three task conditions: completing a written grammar test, participating in an oral interview, and narrating a story. Results support the hypothesis that the utterances of second language learners show systematic variability related to task. (SED)

Examines the syntactic complexity and grammatical transformations used by students of English as a foreign language. Suggests that they use and expand syntactic structures in a manner similar to native speakers. (EL)

Indicates that sentence combining and kernel identification training enabled sixth-grade students to comprehend longer, syntactically more complex sentences than control group students and to retain this ability over a six-week period. (HOD)