Translating legal and bureaucratic language into plain, comprehensible English is not amenable to simple rules and procedures. Rewriting comprehensibly requires specialized knowledge about language and an awareness of a number of misconceptions and pitfalls. This paper discusses what not to do in rewriting, based upon rewritten documents presently…

This paper presents 111 specific activities to help elementary students develop their creative writing skills. For each activity, suggestions are given for ways to begin and to develop the activity and for follow-up. Other sections of the paper discuss the type of classroom climate which is conducive to the development of creative writing skills,…

This article provides suggestions for generating real conversation in the foreign language classroom. Garfinkel suggests using cameras for students to take pictures to talk about, and Gillett suggests that students be involved in the preparation, operation and display of media. Conner advocates round table discussions, language games, and panel…

Research indicates that dialect is used in children's books to suggest the geographic background, social class, educational level, and intelligence of literary characters. Several studies show, however, that young readers develop negative attitudes about characters who speak nonstandard dialects and that these attitudes are intensified if the…

Part of the Grade Teacher Special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts.

A study was conducted to determine the meanings people give to certain words that describe different groups of people. Participants indicated the chronological age they have in mind when using 15 age terms, including baby, senior citizen, adolescent, infant, mature, elderly, youth, and old. The 150 replies to the questionnaire came from college…

The 10 articles in this book examine how comprehension is affected by what the reader brings to the text, the manner in which the text is structured by the author, and the contextual variables that shape the meaning derived by the reader. Specific topics covered in the articles are (1) background knowledge and comprehension, (2) learning how to…

Many linguists have maintained that the pronouns "he,""his," and "him" and the noun "man," when used in the generic sense, legitimately refer to both males and females and effectively cue readers to think of both. Others have argued, however, that the generic terms cause readers to "filter out" or…

Two experiments investigated the relationship between cultural schemata and reading comprehension. Subjects for the first experiment were 186 eighth grade students who attended one of five schools--two predominately black inner-city schools, two predominately white working class area schools, and a predominately white agricultural area school.…

A "gambit" is any of the hundreds of brief, idiomatic rejoinders, rhetorical phrases, or comments that are essential to fluent conversation. This textbook fosters familiarity with such phrases in English by encouraging their use in the carrying out of a series of provocative class exercises, including a handwriting analysis and a "love test."…

The background and the current status of Chinese newspapers in the United States are examined in this paper. The first section considers early immigration patterns of Chinese people, their immigration to the West Coast of the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, laws passed to exclude Chinese from legally entering the U.S., and…

The depth and pervasiveness of linguistic symbols of sexual identity, difference, and hierarchy are discussed in this paper. After noting that the language of sexism begins at birth and is recognized and used by preschool children, the paper points to patterns of linguistic sexism in the semantics and syntax of the English language, in written and…

Typically, teachers approach ambiguity in student writing by suggesting that students focus on diction, syntax, and writing format; however, the works of modernists (including T.S. Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Marx, and Pablo Picasso) suggest the importance of conceptions of semantic clarity. Transformational models for syntactic elements in…

Sex-related language stereotypes and sex-related differences in language usage are examined in this paper, and some recent research findings that illuminate them are reported. The following topics are among those discussed: seemingly universal characterizations of women's speech as gossip, nagging, or chatting, partially explained by most…

The term "syllabus" usually refers to an outline statement of what is to be taught and learned in a particular course. Among the several types of statements for language-teaching syllabuses are the grammatical, notional, and situational. These statements are not in themselves syllabuses but can be called pre-syllabuses. A grammatical…