The development of oral language proficiency as a requirement for bilingual and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teacher certification in New Jersey is chronicled. Efforts made toward the preparation of bilingual and ESL teachers to accommodate the increasing numbers of limited English proficient students in the state are outlined, beginning…

As the United States entered the nineteenth century, it did so under the influence of the Second Great Awakening. This was the second wave of revivalism to sweep the nation, and it originated in the frontier as the Great Western Revival. One pertinent characteristic of the revival was its rhetoric, a rhetoric that was a prime expression of a…

Teaching Spanish while either restricting classroom use of the textbook or ignoring application of the computer is a losing proposition. Withdrawn from the typographic-video world that engages them daily, students are deprived of their most comfortable means of knowledge acquisition. Typography and visual images can be an immeasurable aid in…

Designed to improve students' discussion skills and to promote independent reading, the "Talking about Books" program stresses the improvement of oral language through peer group discussion of books. Like the Junior Great Books program, "Talking about Books" requires that students read selected books independently and then participate in group…

The development of literacy is traced in this paper to promote the thesis that dependence on literacy education naturally leads to two competing cultures, one oral and one literate. Events in the development of the Greek alphabet are traced to advance the argument, and the differences between cultures dependent on Greek and non-Greek writing…

Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

There appear to be two basic theories about the relationship of written language to oral language and the relationship of writing to reading. The first theory views written language as a derivative of oral language and as an alternate but parallel form of oral language. The pedagogical implications of this model suggest that the problems of…

Because most adult students learning English by correspondence never meet their tutors, a study was conducted in which students were asked to send in tape recordings of some experience in their lives. As in the impersonal and rather sterile situation of correspondence study, the students were talking to a listener they could not visualize so that…

Children can acquire written language skills and abilities through the natural process by which they acquire oral language. If as infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, children are exposed to rich print environments, they transfer assumptions from experiences with oral dialogue to the more focused situations of print. Discrepancies in the ease with…

To ascertain what type of environment exists in elementary classrooms in the United States to stimulate oral language, questionnaires were mailed to 500 classroom teachers. Data from the 412 respondents indicated that 83% believed their college courses in language arts had not prepared them to encourage the development of children's language, and…

Current reading theory suggests that oral language skills and reading skills interact with and implement each other. Three guidelines are helpful in shaping the development of proficient readers. (1) From kindergarten on, each year should be spent moving from oral language to print. Furthermore, the move within oral language should be from…

To ensure that all of the subskills undergirding pupils' speaking are identified, taught, and reinforced, the School District of Philadelphia prepared hierarchical listings of skills as exemplified in specific student behaviors. The structured sequence of oral language behaviors are stated operationally and are identified at 14 levels in terms of…

Because inexperienced or basic writers depend on the semantics of everyday spoken dialogue when writing, research on written composition and the developmental links between spoken and written language should be more accessible to the practitioners who teach writing to those students. A review of the literature supports the theory of a semantic…

The use of holistic cognitive style in black language is discussed in this paper. Two types of cognitive style, analytic and holistic, are identified. Holistic thinkers are described as socially oriented while analytical thinkers are characterized as task oriented. Evidence is given to support the claim that blacks tend to be holistic thinkers and…

Indicates that, in relation to oral systems, written systems are more complex in structure, reveal more adjectival but less adverbial elaboration, show more complex verbal structures, and contain fewer indices of personal reference. (RL)