Showing papers on "Written language published in 1969"

Investigating English Style

Abstract: A series to meet the need for books on modern English that are both up-to-date and authoritative.For the scholar, the teacher, the student and the general reader, but especially for English-speaking students of language and linguistics in institutions where English is the language of instruction, or advanced specialist students of English in universities where English is taught as a foreign language.

Development of Readability Analysis.

Abstract: The studies reported here are part of a research program whose purpose is to increase the effectiveness with which students acquire knowledge from written instructional materials The studies had both a basic and an applied objective The basic objective was to obtain evidence upon which to base a theory of the processes involved in language comprehension The correlations between a large number of linguistic features and a measure of the difficulty students exhibited in comprehending the written language samples in which those features occurred were determined The number of linguistic features which can be conceptualized numbers in the hundreds, most of which must be regarded as potentially representing a stimulus involved in the comprehension processes, because present theory of comprehension is too primitive to permit the authors to identify or to rule out more than a few of those features The applied objective was to develop regression formulas for estimating if instructional materials are suitable for students of varying levels of language comprehension ability These readability formulas provide a partial solution to the problem of fitting materials to students That is, students may be provided with materials suited to their levels of comprehension ability not only by manipulating the materials rto make them suitably understandable but also by selecting and using just those materials which are suited to the students' comprehension ability (JL)

The Boundaries of Written Words as Seen by First Graders1

Abstract: if one aspect of learning to read can be described as learning to associate groups of letters with the spoken words which are their counter-parts, then the child's inability to determine the boundaries for written words may make it difficult for the child to form this association. This study attempted to determine the extent to which 39 children who had been in first grade for two and a half months were able to discriminate the boundaries of written words. The best readers in the class were completing their third pre-primer. The Scott Foresman series, "The New Basic Readers," with its emphasis on vocabulary and sentence control, rather than on spelling-to-sound correspondences, served as their introduction to reading. Since what children learn depends greatly upon the nature of the instructional materials to which they are exposed, the data obtained from these 39 children may be peculiar to their particular experiences. The intent of this study is not to describe typical first grade behavior in the discrimination of word boundaries. Rather, the purpose is to demonstrate the extent and types of confusions about word boundaries among these children and to suggest that reasonable attempts to define a word are made by the chad unsuspected and unaided by teacher or textbook

Reading comprehension and writing of second and third graders

Abstract: many research studies have demonstrated relationships between listening and speaking, listening and reading, and speaking and reading. However, there is a paucity of research concerning the relationship between reading and writing. Evidence of this was given by Hildreth as early as 1948, who stated that "in spite of the vast amount of research on reading problems, little attention has been paid to reading and language interrelationships in school instruction." Gunn and Barlow (1952) cite just a single investiga tion by Oftedal (1948) who had third grade children plan, organize, and record their stories by drawing a series of pictures. DeBoer ('. 5) and Schmieder (1958) mention no studies in connection with the written language of children in the first three grades. At the Carnegie Institute of Technology, fifty educators representing many geographical areas of the United States attended a Research Conference for Project English, an undertaking of the United States Office of Education, and indicated as a group that additional knowledge was needed concerning the relationship between read ing and writing (Steinburg and Jenkins, 1962). The purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between the measured reading comprehension and the basic sen tence types and sentence structural patterns in compositions writ ten by second and third grade children. The following relationships were investigated: a] between the measured reading comprehen sion of second and third graders ( as total groups and classified as above average, average, and below average readers) and the basic sentence types used in their written compositions, and b] between the measured reading comprehension of second and third graders (as total groups and classified as above average, average, and below average readers) and the basic sentence structural patterns used in their written compositions. The study was descriptive, using a cross-sectional approach for the collection of data on reading comprehension and writing samples to permit investigation of the relationships. Seven second and third grade classes from schools in the Parkland School District

The written language

Abstract: This chapter focuses on the written language. Words must be spoken to reach their full expressiveness. So children must talk. Reading is dependent upon the spoken language, writing upon the integration of reading and speaking. In education the more specialized and complex the subject, the more complex is the language. With the written language one can abolish the barriers of distance and time. The skill of using the written language, so elusive so often for the less able child, is related to the meaningful art of speaking and to those other more available languages of drawing, painting, moving, dancing, and acting, and to the active, doing life that brings him into contact with the world around. It is important that these skills shall be means of communication, a language that they shall comprehend not only with the eye but with the mind. It is vital that when a child attempts to express, he should not develop hostility to reading and his efforts receive acceptance and assistance. The stress must be on expressing.

Discover and Transform: A Method of Teaching Writing to Foreign Students.

Abstract: Linguistically-oriented materials for teaching writing are of relatively recent interest to ESL teachers. The linguistic method was originally developed primarily for the purpose of teaching oral English to students interested in learning to converse in the language. Those students interested in the written language have for the most part continued to learn it via the translation method, going through Theodore Dreiser or Joseph Conrad, dictionaries in hand. Until very recently, then, non-native students of English have learned to speak the language or to read it, but seldom to write it.

The Language Issue in Communist Chinese Education.

Abstract: THE COMMUNIST CHINESE REGIME has made language reform a cornerstone of its cultural and educational program. This paper attempts to consider whether the sole concern is the utilitarian goal of increased literacy or whether there are revolutionary values involved and in identifying some of the motives underlying the language reform policy, to clarify its implications for education. Before the question of reform can be considered, certain key characteristics of the language must be described. First of all, it is an ancient language that has survived relatively unchanged in its written form since the standardization of writing in the third century B.C., making it the medium for the oldest continuous literary tradition in the world. Closely identified with Confucian orthodoxy, this written language has been the mainstay of traditional Chinese culture and cultural continuity. Chinese is written in non-phonetic ideographs of which there are approximately 40,000, each conveying an idea of its own. Derived originally from pictographic representations which had become stylized and simplified centuries before standardization, ideographs can consist of from one to twenty-seven strokes. Thus, instead of learning two dozen letters and some rules governing their use, a literate Chinese must master several thousand complicated ideographs and their range of different contextual meanings. Because the ideographs are not tied to phonetic patterns of pronunciation, he also must learn the sound syllables with which individual ideographs are read. Due in part to the non-phonetic nature of the written language, it has long been divorced from spoken Chinese, which has undergone such drastic changes in vocabulary, style, and syntax that it could almost be considered a completely separate language from written Chinese. Moreover, the various dialects spoken within the vast Chinese territory are so different from each other that some linguists have classified them as separate languages. For centuries the common written language has served to unite these linguistically diverse regions both politically and culturally. A single syllable in the spoken language represents the pronunciation of one ideograph and thus, in one sense, syllables can be considered as words in Chinese. Since spoken Chinese uses only about 400 different syllables and an average vocabulary will consist of several thousand words, there are a large number of homophones, resulting in ambiguity. This problem does not exist in the written

Teaching Logical Relationships in Written Discourse.

Abstract: When the main emphasis in teaching English as a foreign language was on reading (in the heyday of the Michael West readers), attention focused on vocabulary control. The selection and rate of introduction of vocabulary were main concerns; that is, the approach was strongly word-centered. With the development of audio-lingual methods, the emphasis shifted to the teaching of phonology and structure, and the approach became sentence-centered. Now reading is getting more attention than it has in recent years, and there seems to be a trend toward an approach that might be called discoursecentered. Far too little is known, however, about ways to deal with the reading problems of non-native speakers of English. The comprehension of written language involves a large number of factors: lexical, grammatical, and cultural meanings, connections between sentences, paragraph structure, the organization of longer selections, and many other elements. Connected discourse calls for reading skills in addition to those required for the reading of individual sentences. Just as a student who reads word-for-word may end up by failing to comprehend the meaning of the sentence in which the words occur, a student may read sentence-by-sentence and fail to grasp the meaning of a paragraph because he does not sense the relationships between sentences. The necessary skills, particularly in the reading of expository discourse, involve the recognition of logical as well as lexical and structural relationships, for the three are inextricable. In trying to help non-native speakers with reading, it seems likely that more attention should be paid to logical relationships than is usually the case, for foreign students may be accustomed to different conventions of reasoning and rhetoric. The differences may be sufficiently great, in fact, that logical relationships encounter as much interference from the foreign student's own language habits as do the phonology and syntax of English. Nevertheless it is common for English textbooks for foreign students to mention logical relationships only in an exercise or two on the use of connectives such as however, moreover, therefore, etc. Our ways of expressing ideas in expository writing are a heritage of the oral rhetoric of our Greek and Roman cultural forebears. But because these are our conventions, we can by no means assume that these habits are "normal" for all people, that this is the way human beings in general think and reason and order their ideas in written form. These cultural aspects of

First Language Background as It Affects ESL Teaching

Abstract: Many ESL teachers are sensitively aware that no two classes of students are alike. Some ESL teachers are even aware that no two students are alike. Other ESL teachers seem to have little realization of the differences in the ESL teaching situation in which they find themselves when their students come from different language backgrounds. There are various kinds of ESL classes: (1) There may be a homogeneous class such as that composed of a group of Arab students learning English. (2) There may be a heterogeneous ESL class composed of students from Japan, Turkey, Spain, India, etc. (3) There may be a homogeneous class for whom English is not a second language but a third language, such as Moroccans or Vietnamese, all of whom learned French. (4) There may be a heterogeneous class of students from various countries who have studied various languages and for whom English is a third language. (5) There may be a class composed of students who have studied more than one other language before beginning English, such as Armenians or SerboCroatians from Turkey who know Turkish, learned French, and are tackling English. Teaching techniques for teaching English as a second language or as a foreign language should, of course, be different when teaching groups composed of different kinds of students. The drilling, manipulating, transforming, repeating techniques which are believed by some teachers to be the solution to the foreign language-teaching problem need modification according to the characteristics of the students and the classes being taught.

Kinds of english spoken, written, literary∗

Abstract: ∗ This paper was read at the Annual Conference of the National Association for the Teaching of English, 1969.

Language Experience Approach to Reading.

Abstract: language experience programs in reading developed in response to demands for more meaningful language instruction. In them, reading is taught as a part of a total language program which brings out the interrelatedness and interdependence of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They are designed to equip children to meet the demands placed on their language skills by the current emphasis on inquiry and discovery in school curricula, and to develop for the modern world thinking citizens who can communi cate with each other. The popularity of the method with both chil dren and teachers stems from the fact that it develops language in close relation to children's experiences and builds a program that is in harmony with both the communication needs and the interests of the children being taught. The expression, "reading is thinking", has become so widely accepted that it is almost a clich?. Many educators are concerned however, that reading is not always treated as a thinking process during the initial stages of instruction. They recognize that reading habits developed by the beginner often persist throughout his read ing career. The child who learns in first grade that good reading can be equated with recognizing words easily, will not readily accept in a later gracte that reading is thinking about the ideas represented by the words. There is justifiable concern that reading be intro duced as a thinking process and maintained at that level during the early stages of instruction when the mechanics of word rec ognition must be mastered, and that the emphasis in instruction be on the derivation of ideas from the printed symbols, rather than on the "decoding" process. This should not present a problem if reading is accepted as just one phase of language and school instruction is planned to incorporate it as a part of the natural pat tern of language development?if the teacher studies the oral lan guage development of each child in her charge and, on this base, builds a program.

A Comparison of Written Compositions of Head-Start Pupils With Non-Head-Start Pupils

Abstract: The problem of this study was to compare the written language development of two groups of disadvantaged children at the end of their fourth year of school.