An alternative curriculum for Freshman Composition, designed to help students develop cognitive skills useful for academic writing in other courses, involves eight discipline-specific assignments, building from relatively simple writing tasks such as taking lecture notes and keeping an academic journal, through book reports, essay examinations,…

Research conducted since the early 1970s has provided important insights into how written language develops and how teachers can best foster that growth. One of these promotes the holistic approach to language instruction--to nurture the emergent speller is to nurture the emergent reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker. Another important…

The language community of urban Hispanics in the United States and educational strategies that are appropriate for teaching English as a second language (ESL) in a bilingual/bidialectal language situation are considered. Within the New York City Hispanic community of Puerto Ricans, several varieties of English have been noted: standard English,…

The materials status report for Uigur, a Turkic language spoken in the Sinkiang-Uigur Autonomous Region in northwest China and in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Kazakh and Uzbek, is one of a series intended to provide the nonspecialist with a picture of the availability and quality of texts for teaching various languages to English speakers.…

A study investigated the extent to which oral language forms influence the written products of Mexican-American students attending an inner city school in a low income neighborhood. For the study, writing samples from 78 third grade and 92 sixth grade students were analyzed for Spanish, interlanguage, and Chicano English features. (Interlanguage…

Symbolic meaning expressed by Chinese language characters is helpful to non-Chinese persons in understanding Chinese culture. The implicit metaphors in Chinese characters present pictographic descriptions of the meaning in the form of a story, situation, or symbol which places the otherwise abstract concept in a cultural context. All languages…

The school setting is now the only place where one can learn French in Zaire. At present Zaire is regaining its authenticity especially through the effort to promote its native language and literature. At the same time, French is also gaining ground due to the increase in formal education, still almost totally in French. Summaries of the research…

English essayist literacy shares many features with the discourse patterns of English speakers. Where these patterns are different from those of another ethnic group, literacy will be experienced as interethnic communication. Athabaskan discourse differs from that of English in (1) presentation of self (an Athabaskan is silent with new…

A survey of the substance of linguistics and of the activities of linguists is presented in an attempt to acquaint ordinary readers with the various aspects of la"guage. A discussion of the human tendency toward speech, of the traits of language, and of phonetic elements prepares the way for an analysis of the structure of languag e in terms of…

The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…

This instructor's manual is part of Fluency First, a complete oral instruction program in English as a second language designed primarily for non-English-speaking adult Canadians who are illiterate in their own language. The manual is intended to serve as a bridge between oral instruction and a literacy course, permitting the student to make the…

Research on central processing dysfunctions in children is reviewed in three major areas. The first, dysfunctions in the analysis of sensory information, includes auditory, visual, and haptic processing. The second, dysfunction in the synthesis of sensory information, covers multiple stimulus integration and short-term memory. The third area of…

A survey of studies on handwriting is undertaken in this research review. Sources of information on the history of handwriting from its earliest beginnings to present attitudes toward it are indicated. Also discussed are research findings on the handwriting act (hand movement, handwriting instruments, and penmanship), the handwriting product (in…

A course in advanced composition and analytical reading designed for elementary school teachers is proposed. Stressing the importance of literary appreciation of works of exceptional merit, the author returns to the systematic study of English composition using literature as the basis of the composition course. Some of the authors mentioned are…

Acoustical correlates of stress can only be evaluated in comparison with some "standard" specifying which syllables are actually stressed. The Standard should be consistent from time to time, and largely independent of talker and listener idiosyncrasies. Three phonetically-trained subjects listened to repeatedly spoken texts and spontaneous…