Sociolinguistic Studies in a Data Base of Spoken Swedish (Sprakdata) is a project to describe the language from a semantic-communicative point of view. The purposes are to (1) investigate the possibility of grouping informants based on results of a semantic-communicative analysis of recorded spoken language and (2) examine possible…

Languages have lost status in the educational system, and oral skills are less effectively and rigorously taught. However, a University of Leeds program providing short, intensive courses in administrative and legal French for British civil servants has been found to be very effective in developing the participants' oral and aural skills. The…

The ten stories in this book were told by Cree storytellers Peter Vandall and Joe Douquette and recorded at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College in Saskatoon in 1982. Each story is written in Cree text, transcribed into phonetic Cree, and translated into English. All the stories were told together as parts of a single performance, each speaker…

In summer 1988, Tarrant County Junior College, Northeast Campus, conducted a series of eight 16-hour workshops and three 32-hour workshops for high school teachers of foreign languages. The workshops were intended primarily as in-service training to help foreign language teachers: (1) improve their oral proficiency in the language they teach; (2)…

The development of an indirect oral proficiency test for foreign languages by the Defense Language Institute is described. The technique uses taped questions to elicit answers, also taped, that are evaluated according to the Foreign Service Institute's oral proficiency rating scale of 0 to 5. Tape recordings are used because of the large numbers…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with the following topics: (1) confrontation between public school teachers and their employers, (2) President Jimmy Carter's communication with the black electorate, (3) public communication channels regarding…

The Instructional Aide Program of the Columbus (Ohio) Public Schools trained instructional aides to provide direct instruction to selected underachieving pupils in the classroom setting. The aides attended in-service training sessions and were provided with supplementary materials and numerous instructional activities in the areas of oral…

This collection of 10 selected conference papers report the results of language testing research. Titles and authors are: "Computerized Adaptive Language Testing: A Spanish Placement Exam" (Jerry W. Larson); "Utilizing Rasch Analysis to Detect Cheating on Language Examinations" (Harold S. Madsen); "Scalar Analysis of…

Offering a variety of perspectives, the articles in this book are intended for those who teach reading and writing; those who make policy influencing what is taught, how, and to whom; and those individuals who would influence the influential. The 18 articles are grouped into four sections: "Literacy, Politics, and Policies"; "Forms of Literacy";…

A collection of 21 papers, most presented at the Fifth International Conference on Contrastive Projects in June 1982 in Finland, includes: "Searching for Linguistic Universals through Contrastive Analysis,""Oral Discourse and Contrastive Analysis: Towards a French vs. Finno-Scandinavian Model,""Cultural Effect on the Comprehensibility of Reading…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the communicative competence of teenage boys in a northern United States urban warren; (2) the effects of second language learning upon reading achievement in…

To examine some of the linguistic aspects of Chicano English (a variety of English commonly spoken by Mexican American bilinguals in the Southwest) which present problems in the acquisition of written Standard English, sample writings were collected from 15 University of Texas-El Paso students enrolled in an English as a Second Language course. To…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. Among the topics covered in the 31 titles are the following: the oral English syntax of bilingual Indian children in Manitoba, Canada; linguistic style shifting in black English; oral language assessment by sentence repetition;…

Considers literature as something different from the texts themselves (specifically, a way of reading that includes the writer, the text, and the reader) so that the purposes of teachers and readers may be considered, and a flexible approach to selection, organization, and pedagogy be permitted. (SRT)

Administrators in the U.S. education system need to be more than good managers, they need to understand high-quality reading instruction, so they can serve their teachers and help their school meet Reading First requirements. Although written with the administrator in mind, this collection also can be used by teachers, teacher educators, staff…