The language development processes of decreolization and second language acquisition are compared. The decreolization of Guyanese creole negation and the acquisition of the English negative by an adult Spanish speaker are described. Each process is seen as a series of internal changes on a continuum of developmental stages which bring speakers…

In this paper, the author (1) weighs the educational value of an oral language program which attempts to teach standard dialect to speakers of a nonstandard dialect and (2) considers the probable success of such a program, given the present social trends. He voices the following objections: (a) teaching a speaker of nonstandard dialect the…

The purpose of this 10th-grade unit on language is to pose, for students, basic and tentative questions about the rhetorical uses of language. Examples are provided which designate the modes of language: Daniel Fogarty's story of rhetoric to show language which informs; materials from Northrop Frye to show language which inquires; a John F.…

Attempts to combine language and composition in the freshman English course at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minnesota) should interest all teachers of English. One project utilized a single key word for several assignments. Students were asked to (1) think through the meaning of the word for a week and write definitions and associations,…

Several types of narrative errors are discussed that were found in the course of an analysis of stories collected in casual settings from a number of American speakers in undirected conversation. The approach to the question of error correction is sociocultural; the emphasis is on the motivation for the error correction. This paper explores the…

The articles in this journal reflect the change that has taken place in the study of women's literature and language: women writers are now judged on their own merits, rather than by comparison to men writers. Included are the following: "A Feminist Perspective in the Classroom," a discussion of the ways in which a feminist perspective has…

Language teaching typically reflects current research, and, until quite recently, grammatical competence (e.g., in the Chomskyan sense) was the major target of linguistic research. Emphasizing the spoken language, the term "fluency," as applied to the foreign language performance of a language learner, is correlated to foreign language…

Observation of child language development is just one way to study how language changes over time. Developmental psycholinguistics shares much common ground with historical linguistics and with studies of languages in contact and the evolution of pidgins and creoles. By studying the way language changes, this paper focuses on clarifying the…

The linguistic abilities demonstrated by second grade students show a high level of competence in the use of syntactic structures and lexicon. This report describes and interprets, in terms of language function, the talking and writing of fifteen Australian children. Transcripts of conversations provide the basis for the linguistic analysis and…

Grammatical transfer is used to render the values and meanings of the structures in Romanian pronouns into English. This device can be used in explaining the exact nuances of Romanian pronouns to speakers of English. In translating from English to Romanian, a special problem is presented by the pronoun "you," which in Romanian can take…

Forms of address in Afghan society reflect the relationships between the speakers as well as the society's structure. In Afghan Persian, or Dari, first, second, and last names have different semantic dimensions. Boys' first names usually consist of two parts or morphemes, of which one may be part of the father's name. Girls' names usually consist…

Because of the language changes that have taken place in the People's Republic of China since 1949, Chinese can be seen as a language divided between the pre-1949 varieties and the post-1949 ones. What is taught in the United States does not reflect the current Chinese situation, partly because most of the native language teachers in the United…

Theoretical aspects of the spectator role in James Britton's (1970) model of language use are explored within a perspective based primarily on the work of George Kelly, Susanne Langer, Jean Piaget, Michael Polanyi, and Denys Harding. This view is amplified in a series of empirical studies based on stories told by children between the ages of two…

In this paper, the structure and the use of language are postulated as socializing agents influencing sex-role learning in three major ways: (1) sex differences occur in language use and parallel sex-role stereotypes; (2) the language that is addressed to children is usually the language of socialization which instructs the child what to do,…

This booklet consists of guidelines for teaching language usage and skills, oral and written composition, and listening in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. A statement of approach introduces the three main sections of the guide. In the first section, programs are detailed in charts under the following four categories for each of the three…