missing); some questions have no results presented; most results are not subjected to statistical tests but are merely presented as frequencies of replies; and where statistical tests are reported, the details are often too sketchy to judge the validity of the procedure. Many of the studies seem to have been executed and analysed by the author’s students, which may account for some of the reporting and validity problems. Still, the patterns of results are intriguing and should prompt further, more controlled research into these issues. Also, where differences are exceptionally large, statistical tests are probably unnecessary to confirm the pattern that is discerned. Interpersonal communication scholars may therefore find the studies useful in revealing the social meanings ascribed to certain nonverbal behaviours and the mediating effects of perceived context and demographics on those interpretations. Practitioners should likewise discern many valuable conclusions about successful and unsuccessful interview behaviours.

Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy

(1988). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 59, No. 6, pp. 698-699.

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind

In this text, the author demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech, as well as written fiction and non-fiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure and intonation, as well as stylistic usages, such as the historical present and the free indirect style. While the book focuses on English, there are also discussions of the North American Indian language, Seneca, and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people.

The Concept of Consciousness in the Theory of Language@@@Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing

Policies delegating control of educational policy to the local level are widespread, yet there has been little examination of the effects of such distributed decision making in the area of advanced...

Policy Matters An Analysis of District-Level Efforts to Increase the Identification of Underrepresented Learners

Intelligence and achievement are two different, but interrelated, constructs and have been studied for over a century in an attempt to explain differences in educational and life outcomes. An enhanced understanding of the relationship between intelligence, both verbal and nonverbal, and achievement may contribute to improving the identification of gifted and talented children, particularly those from low SES populations. This comprehensive literature review examines the link between intelligence and achievement. It also provides a brief summary of selected psychometric theories of intelligence, including the Cattell-Horn Fluid and Crystallized theory of intelligence and Carroll’s three-stratum model of human intelligence. In attempt to gather all relevant scholarly literature, several procedures were used. A search of the key terms in the ERIC, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar databases was performed. In addition, the reference lists from these articles were examined to find additional articles and literature. To conclude, assessment of intelligence is one of the essential criteria for the identification of gifted and talented students. Verbal and nonverbal abilities can be assessed by many contemporary intelligence tests. The literature evidences that verbal abilities have stronger correlation with academic achievement than nonverbal abilities. Furthermore, verbal abilities are related to readiness to learn while nonverbal abilities are related to potential to learn. If intelligence scores are used to predict any kind of future academic performance, both verbal (readiness) and nonverbal (potential) abilities should be evaluated. Besides, in order to identify gifted and talented students, assessment of verbal abilities should accompany with the assessment of nonverbal abilities so that they will be able to survive in advanced academic programs.

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Intelligence and Its Relationship to Achievement

There is a wide-spread socio-educational problem with language testing at its heart: Speakers of minority languages are over-represented in classes for the learning disabled, disordered and educable mentally retarded and under-represented in classes for the gifted. This imbalance is owed to mental measurement practices that involve language tests both directly and indirectly. The source of the problem is a general failure to appreciate the role of language proficiencies in psychological and educational testing. Also the relation between acquired (socially dependent) language proficiencies and so-called non-verbal abilities may be closer than commonly supposed. Among the questions addressed are the following: To what extent is it possible to measure non-verbal abilities without invoking acquired language/dialect proficiencies? Is it possible to get the instructions to non-verbal tasks across to test takers without recourse to one or more particular languages or dialects? Is it possible to make linguistical...

Testing verbal (language) and non-verbal abilities in language minorities: a socio-educational problem in historical perspective

General sign theory per Oller et al (2000a, 2000b) predicts that, to the extent that valid measurements are possible, nonverbal abilities should correlate positively with primary language abilities (Hypothesis 1) Further, nonverbal abilities of persons in the early stages of acquiring a nonprimary language should correlate significantly more positively with proficiencies in their primary language than in their nonprimary language (Hypothesis 2(a)); but as persons approach parity between their primary and any nonprimary language, correlations between nonverbal scores and proficiencies in the two languages should both be positive and not significantly different (Hypothesis 2(b)) The Cattell-Horn theory predicts that nonverbal abilities should correlate equally with primary and nonprimary skills throughout the course of development Gardner’s theory predicts nonsignificant correlations Hypotheses 1, 2(a) and 2(b) are examined in within-subjects, repeated measures designs Study 1 examines 50 children acq

Testing Relations between Language (Verbal) and Nonverbal Abilities in Children and Adults Acquiring a Nonprimary Language.

A general theory of signs shows a deep logical dependency of nonverbal/performance tests on conventional linguistic signs. Two hypotheses follow• Hypothesis 1: To the extent that nonverbal abilitie...

Applying General Sign Theory to Testing Language (Verbal) and Nonverbal Abilities.

Les defenseurs des tests du QI affirment que ces tests permettent de mesurer uniquement les facultes innees et ceci independamment de toute capacite linguistique. Cette idee est appelee la premisse de l'inneite. A l'encontre des critiques formulees par leurs opposants, ces defenseurs disent utiliser des tests non verbaux, des tests de performance qui ne requierent aucun langage (langue ou dialecte). Ici, l'A. examine differentes etudes portant sur des tests de QI verbaux et non verbaux a la lumiere de la theorie generale des signes : la semiotique. Ce cadre permet de montrer que les tests non verbaux ne peuvent etre appliques a des sujets denues de langage. Cette etude permet egalement de mettre en valeur les correlations observees entre tests verbaux et non verbaux et les changements dynamiques qui ont eu lieu au niveau de ces correlations

Kunok Kim

Papers

Testing verbal (language) and non-verbal abilities in language minorities: a socio-educational problem in historical perspective

Testing Relations between Language (Verbal) and Nonverbal Abilities in Children and Adults Acquiring a Nonprimary Language.

Applying General Sign Theory to Testing Language (Verbal) and Nonverbal Abilities.

Can instructions to nonverbal IQ tests be given in pantomime? Additional applications of a general theory of signs