The increasing interest in oral proficiency during the past decade prompted Educational Testing Service (ETS) to undertake the development of the Test of Spoken English (TSE), a standardized test of speaking proficiency of non-native speakers of English. The test has been validated for the selection of non-native teaching assistants applying to…

A 1-day orientation workshop for business clients from other cultures is described. Factors in program design that relate to the specific cultural group addressed are discussed, and include such considerations as culture-specific versus culture-general content, professional focus, and the learning style to which the participants are accustomed.…

The National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs (NASILP) offers a program option for institutions that lack the resources to develop a regular second language program but want to offer instruction in a broad range of languages for international businesses. The cost-effective, media-intensive approach consists of a controlled…

A study investigated the process of learning French by Chinese students, as revealed by student errors in 48 compositions and 33 oral reports. Grammatical, or competency, errors were categorized by type and frequency. Analysis of the results shows the most frequent errors to be, in declining order of occurrence: in the use of articles; choice of…

This second edition of a text has been organized into a sequence that reflects how students learn language--from listening and speaking to reading and writing. The book begins with an overview of the language arts and the teacher's role in planning instruction. Chapters 2 and 3, "Listening to Learn" and "Developing Oral…

This book is intended for researchers and teachers interested in literacy and concerned about classrooms as a context for literacy activity and learning. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "What It Means to be Literate about Classrooms" (Lyn Corno); (2) "Beyond Access: An Ethnographic Study of Reading and Writing in a…

Representing a first attempt by English teachers in Scotland to address a professional mandate that they teach and assess the modes of talking and listening, this booklet outlines both the scope and the details of an oral/aural syllabus. The eight chapters in the booklet cover the following areas: (1) the oral syllabus--principles and approaches;…

Ideas of educational psycholinguists Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman can be combined with the ideas presented in current basal reader manuals to help teachers teach reading more effectively. Since reading and speaking are parallel processes, teachers may invite children to "read" with them, hearing the melody of language as they point to…

A literature review was conducted to discover what programs, philosophies, and methodologies are recommended on the college level for teaching oral Standard English (SE) to speakers of Vernacular Black English (VBE) and to suggest areas of research needs in oral SE training. Most of the speech communication courses in this area are part of…

Intended to provide a basis for a sociolinguistic theory of reading by placing reading within a discussion of the formal and functional characteristics of language use in social settings, this book explores the state of the art of reading and literacy, the relations between spoken and written language, and explanations of reading failure. Chapters…

A combined teacher's manual and learner's manual for one of the Mande languages of Liberia presents materials for about 300 hours of study and is the equivalent of a first-year college language course. The basic text introduces all of the syntactic constructions of Kpelle that learners are likely to encounter in the language, and introduces 1,000…

A study to determine the role of oral language and reading skills in the transfer from two years of reading in Spanish to reading in English had as subjects 191 fourth grade students in a bilingual education program. Students were tested and classified as efficient and non-efficient readers. It was found that: (1) there is a relationship between…

By identifying speculations concerning cognitive abilities and cognition's relation to culture, this paper outlines some of the work surrounding basic writers and speaking-writing relationships. Beginning with a discussion of the differences between speaking and writing popularized by Mina Shaughnessy, the paper goes on to examine studies that…

The goals of a cross-age tutoring program involving first and fifth graders were to stimulate oral language development in first graders and to help them read for meaning. The fifth grade students worked with the younger students on a one-to-one basis to stimulate language development and to encourage the academic growth in other skills necessary…

A study was conducted to determine the feasibility of using oral story making experiences to improve the oral language proficiencies and "sense of story" of fourth grade remedial reading students through select literary experiences. These experiences included exposing the students to literature in read-aloud exercises, and using wordless…