This book contains the following essays regarding sexism and language: "Linguistic Sexism as a Social Issue,""Sexism as Shown through the English Vocabulary,""Sexism in the Language of Marriage," and "Sexism in Children's Books and Elementary Teaching Materials" by Alleen Pace Nilsen; "Gender-Marking in American English: Usage and Reference" by…

It is essential that language arts students in teacher education programs learn more than just facts about language, such as grammar, dialect, and so on. Future teachers must be taught how language, especially the child's language, affects the teacher, the child, and the child's achievement in school. These prospective teachers should learn what…

The competencies established for the language arts program for kindergarten through sixth grade in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, are listed in this document, which indicates grade levels for introducing particular skills, developing skills, and mastering skills. Tests to assist teachers in measuring students' progress in listening comprehension,…

Sociolinguistic attitudes of 160 high school students, 160 parents or other adults, and 40 high school teachers were studied through questionnaires administered in four South Carolina schools. Results indicated that a majority of students and teachers felt that dialect differences interfere with communication in the classroom, but that eradication…

This study investigated the interrelationship of articulation and receptive and expressive language performance by 306 children in kindergarten and first and second grade in Fort Collins, Colorado, with regard to age, sex, and socioeconomic level. Fifty-one males and 51 females from the sample group were tested on three pairs of tests: the Arizona…

The conversational language of 28 men and women born in Maine around the beginning of this century is described and analyzed as it relates to Lakoff's hypotheses in "Language and Women's Place." Transcripts were gathered by students as part of an interdisciplinary course, Women of Maine. Results indicated that there is a traditional…

These newsletters, produced during the first year of activity of a special committee of the National Council of Teachers of English, focus on the back-to-the-basics movement as it affects the teaching of English. The first newsletter describes the establishment of SLATE as an action wing of the council. The other seven deal in turn with specific…

The present practice of surnaming, by which the wife takes on the name of her husband and the children take on the name of the father, favors one of the sexes over the other. In this paper, the egalitarian surnaming system (ESS) is proposed. This system deals equally with the sexes and also serves important social functions, such as providing a…

Traces the history of sociolinguistic studies in West Germany from the early nineteenth century with Humboldt and reports on the state and purposes of sociolinguistic studies in present-day Federal Republic of Germany. Available from Liber Laeromedel, Box 1205, S-22105 Lund, Sweden (Text is in German.) (TL)

This article discusses the use of gestures in foreign language instruction, particularly in the teaching of intonation, stress, and consonant and vowel sounds. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Computer-based multidimensional scaling techniques are used to determine the dimensionality of grammatical variation in three large sets of data: Ross' (1973) Noun Phrase and fake Noun Phrase data; Sankoff's (1974) complementizer "que"-deletion (Montreal French) data; and Cedergren's (1973) syllable-final S-reduction (Panamanian Spanish) data. (DB)

A comparison is made of the way in which talk is regulated, both verbally and nonverbally, in Anglo interaction with the regulation of talk among Indians of the Warm Springs Reservation in central Oregon. (Author/RM)

This article summarizes the results of a study undertaken to investigate the question of second language retention by federal bilingual employees in Canada. (CLK)

Discusses the linguistic, political and social forces central to the development of Chinese characters. (CLK)

An experiment was conducted to determine the conditions under which selective imitation of relative clauses could be produced in preschool. Imitation training was more effective than modeling alone, and instructions and reinforcements were effective in an additive manner. Implications for the role of imitation in language development are…