This document consists of the four issues of a newsletter entitled "Literacy Across the Curriculum" issued during 1990. The newsletter covers articles on classroom and other topical issues, resources, and conferences and announcements related to language for learning. The following topics are discussed in volume 6: analyzing…

This paper states that college radio invokes two ends of a language spectrum -- the clean language authorized for on-air use and the dirty language prohibited from such use, and that the interaction between the two produces "expositional obscenity," a catalytic form of discourse that invites the audience to render a judgment about…

Conversations between mothers and children from three different cultural groups were analyzed to determine culturally preferred narrative elicitation patterns. The three groups included Japanese-speaking mother-child pairs living in Japan, Japanese-speaking, mother-child pairs living in the United States, and English-speaking Canadian mother-child…

This article discusses language simplification as one aspect of a person's speech activity, and relates simplification to second language learning. Translation from language to language and translation within one language are processes through which a person, as decoder, decontextualizes a message form-sequence through perception of its…

This paper focuses on the issue of whether pedagogical mediation will facilitate the acquisition of conversational skills. It argues that it is possible to describe casual conversation, that it has a grammatical structure, and that it is of benefit to English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners for the structure of conversation to be explicitly…

The ideal of a world where bilingualism or multilingualism is a normal and accepted feature is promoted in a commissioned report for International Literacy Year. It is noted that many minority groups are forced into bilingualism as a necessity for survival, but that those skills are rarely seen as an advantage and often seen as a cause of…

The language of Black America is rich and diverse in its utterance, whether through music (Jazz, Blues, Soul, Gospel, and Rap), through street corner "shuckin''n jivin'," or through writing. This language is used as a means of survival, of getting from one day to the next. Blacks have developed a system of taking the fewest words and…

Research on the language development of children in immersion programs has uncovered a certain amount of data. Immersion students have less well developed productive skills than their francophone peers and passive receptive skills which approach those of francophones. Error analysis studies have found that immersion students reach a plateau in…

While language switching among multilinguals has been studied in a wide variety of contexts, few attempts have been made to generalize or to integrate findings into useful communication theory. Since language switching is an important part of personal as well as group identity and since issues surrounding language identity are often a focal point…

Students need to be made comfortable with the "foreign" language of British English before they can fathom the range of and changes in English literature through the centuries. In one approach to college English, students spend most of the first semester studying nineteenth century novels. After having studied four such novels, each for between…

After reviewing criticisms of the exclusive use of readability formulas to evaluate text difficulty and describing successful efforts to broaden the traditional readability formula approach, this report presents a 20 item checklist for determining text comprehensibility based on four criteria: (1) specific objectives or outcomes expected from the…

A study investigated whether direct instruction in story constituents and their interrelationships could enhance children's organization in story writing. It was hypothesized that the special instruction could provide children with an internalized prototype story structure that could serve as a heuristic or planning device for organizing…

The state of the art in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) is characterized by diversity in philosophies, activities, and materials. It has been summarized in a variety of reports. The perspectives developed here are a supplement to the other reports rather than a summary. Aspects of the state of the art are examined through…

Substantial linguistic growth took place in grade one children who were taught beginning reading by a language experience approach. (JH)

Current patterns of Patois (introduced by West Indian Creoles) as used by young Jamaicans in England is presented. Forty-five British-born individuals, aged 16 to 23, whose parents were Jamaican immigrants, participated in a study structured to elicit a wide range of speech patterns. Subjects differed greatly in educational background and in…