Reflecting the work of Yetta Goodman on child language development, this paper examines Goodman's five "roots of literacy" and offers suggestions on classroom techniques for nurturing these roots. The first half of the paper explains how Goodman identified the roots of literacy and describes each of them, including (1) print awareness in…

The reading and writing behavior of seven mildly mentally retarded and 12 moderately retarded adolescents was analyzed. Data were collected in the classroom on 11 language tasks, including drawing, forming letters and numbers, and performing general print production. Ss were also asked to answer historical/experiential questions and…

Proposals currently being debated for a reform of the examination system at 18+ in England and Wales, and comments on the proposals, are presented to aid in future planning of language courses in Northern Ireland. The context in which the new proposals arose is briefly examined. The following three standard course proposals are diagrammed for…

A supplement is presented to volumes one, two, and three of a basic course in Persian that is designed for use in the Defense Language Institute's intensive programs for native English speakers. Part one introduces the student to a phonemic transcription which is derived from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Part two applies the modified…

THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD "LANGUAGE" CAN BE LIMITED TO MEAN "A VOCAL AND AUDITORY MEANS OF COMMUNICATION, WHICH WORKS BY THE SYMBOLIC PROCESS, WHICH HAS A COMPLEX STRUCTURE, AND WHICH IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING SO LONG AS IT REMAINS IN USE." THERE ARE SIX IMPLICATIONS OF THIS DEFINITION--(1) ALTHOUGH LANGUAGE IS PRIMARILY AUDITORY AND VOCAL, IT CAN…

The 1963 language arts project in Wagon Mound, New Mexico, was designed to make administrators and teachers aware of and concerned about the problems of teaching English to Spanish-speaking children in grades 1-12. General and specific objectives and instructional techniques stressed improvement of oral and written communication. An analysis of…

This study tries to establish a baseline for the teaching of the French subjunctive in the United States and to encourage further scholarship by summarizing past activities. Distinctive subjunctive structures were extracted from 18 French newspapers and magazines and 15 recorded, non-directed interviews with native informants, thus providing…

This study examined the hypothesis of a linear, bipolar continuum, with the principles of oral language at one end and those of written language at the other. Six sources of language were identified and arranged along the continuum, to reflect their underlying governing principles: spontaneous oral language of children, children's folk songs,…

A case study approach is used to investigate written linguistic performance among black college freshmen from lower socio-economic and black nonstandard English (BNE) speaking backgrounds who are assigned to remedial-type English skills courses and generally assumed by their teachers and others to lack either or both competence or performance…

The chief purposes of this book are the illustration of an analytical approach to tone languages, a methodology based upon recent linguistic advance, and the presentation of firsthand data on Mixteco and Mazateco, languages which represent two very different structural arrangements of linguistic tone. Part 1 describes some of the types of…

To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

Two articles on sentence construction and eight on the paragraph comprise this publication. Francis Christensen contributes four articles on (1) the use of loose, cumulative sentences, (2) sentence openers, with illustrations from Hemingway, (3) a generative rhetoric for the paragraph, and (4) the formation of principles of paragraph composition…

This basic course in Persian concentrates on the spoken language, illustrated by conversation based on everyday situations. After a thorough grounding in pronunciation and in basic grammatical features, the student is introduced to the writing system of Persian. Some of the basic differences between spoken and written styles are explained.…

This paper describes a system for Choctaw orthography and discusses the principles and rules that can be used to govern the spelling system for the language. The orthography system is based on a study of documents written by comtemporary Chocktaws. The system proposed here seeks to be as accurate a representation of the spoken language as possible…

Reports on the continuing work in the development of a computerized writing system for American Sign Language (ASL) called Signfont. Inventories for handshapes and nonmanual markers are presented and discussed extensively. A proposed inventory of phonetic handshapes in ASL are appended. (Author/LMO)