The third of seven booklets on adults with learning disabilities, this manual addresses the evaluation and remediation of oral language difficulties. An assessment section focuses on behaviors and disorders which adult education teachers should look for as well as informal diagnostic tasks in auditory discrimination, grammar, vocabulary, social…

This monograph is designed to acquaint classroom teachers with the language proficiency guidelines of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the oral testing guidelines of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The guidelines are intended for language proficiency assessment by the oral interview technique. Designated…

Information on the need for and effectiveness of separate course sections for limited-English-speaking college students in basic oral communication courses is presented. The information was gathered from 3 sources: (1) a survey of 137 instutions granting graduate degrees in communication arts and sciences; (2) a survey of enrollees in…

The Department of Foreign Languages at Tarrant County (Texas) Junior College (TCJC) places primary instructional emphasis in elementary and intermediate language courses on the development of students' oral communication competence. Noting the differences in the oral proficiency of TCJC students and that of area high school graduates seeking…

A cognitive developmental theory of reading was proposed and tested in a longitudinal study that (1) compared the development of conceptual reasoning (Piaget's "operativity") and oral language (vocabulary and grammar closure) of 148 Australian children during the first 5 years of school and (2) traced the relationship of these variables to reading…

A computer program for classifying elements of a language corpus for large-scale analysis is discussed. The approach is based on the assumption that there is a natural unit in speech processing and production, called a tone unit. The program "tags" the five grammatical phrase types (verb, adverb, adjective, noun, and prepositional) to…

This volume of measurement instruments in the English language arts is the second one produced by the Research Instruments Project (TRIP), which was designed to collect and evaluate research instruments in language arts, language and language development, literacy, literature, oral language, reading, teacher knowledge/attitudes, and writing. The…

The conventional notion of the term "literacy" is rather narrow. Harvey Graff's work demonstrates that literacy in Western society not only means the ability to read and write, but also takes in a profusion of values and beliefs including empathy, innovativeness, and achievement. By contrast, a term such as illiterate comes to represent social…

To analyze and compare specific oral communication behaviors of primary school pupils who score high on reading and language tests with those who score low, a study was conducted on approximatley 200 students who were classified as (1) high language, (2) high reading, (3) low language, or (4) low reading according to their scores on the…

A study examined acquisition of new vocabulary through oral stories in first-, third-, and fifth-grade children. Each subject heard four stories, each including four nonsense words repeated three times. These novel words represented common nouns whose meanings could be derived from propositional information associated with their occurrence. The…

Contained in this yearbook are the proceedings of the fifth annual Arizona State University Reading Conference. This edition reflects an emphasis on a wide range of topics, including study skills, oral language, and teaching strategies. Following a foreword, the conference articles discuss the following: (1) study skills across the curriculum, (2)…

The primary thesis of the "audread" model of language development is that children in a literate society first learn to think, then they learn to communicate and receive thoughts through oral language, and then they learn to communicate through written language (graphic representations). Four projects based on concepts from the audread…

The dependence of reading on speech is based on three assumptions: speech is the primary language system, acquired naturally without direct instruction; alphabetic writing systems are more or less phonetic representations of oral language; and speech appears to be an essential foundation for the acquisition of reading ability. By presupposing…

Because many urban youth have grown up in communities where only nonstandard English is spoken, and because schools lack programming to teach standard English, these youth frequently graduate from high school without acquiring communication skills necessary for professional careers. Prospective employers tend to associate certain dialects with…

The creative oral language elicited from 45 preoperational and 40 concrete operational first grade students was analyzed to study the relationship between cognitive development and the types of case relationships produced. Each child's language was analyzed for eight noun/verb relationships, including state, process, action, experience, location,…