The following papers on subject in South Asian languages are compiled here: (1) "Subject in Sanskrit" by George Cardona; (2) "Is Sinhala a Subject Language? (or, How Restricted is Your PNP?)" by James W. Gair; (3) "Some Syntactic Reflexes of Sub-Categories of Agent in Hindi" by Peter Edwin Hook; (4) "The Notion…

A British ethnolinguistic study described the language behavior of 12 preschool children during their first experience in a formal educational setting where they constituted a linguistic minority. All were third-generation, British-born children of Moslem parents of ethnic Pakistani background; their home language was a vernacular Panjabi. Data…

Readings on language and literacy within their social context include: "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" (Bronislaw Malinowski); "Toward Ethnographies of Communication" (Dell Hymes); "Language as Social Semiotic" (M. A. K. Halliday); "Language and Ideology" (V. N. Volosinov); "Family…

More than 250,000 of Fiji's citizens are descendants of Indian indentured laborers of diverse origins. There are still distinct social groups based on language, religion, and place of origin. However, nearly all Fiji Indians speak one language called Fiji Hindustani. Other languages, such as Gujarati, Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, are still spoken,…

A range of case studies is presented that describes the idea that literacy is embedded in social contexts in different cultural settings. Organized by theme, the book illustrates both the differences and connections between cultural groups. Although the case studies span the whole age range, the book focuses particularly on the variety of use of…

Discusses the ethnographic investigation of a multilingual adolescent peer group in which various forms of second/other-language learner status had considerable social significance. The study illustrates the ways a repertoire of languages and language learner statuses serve as differentiated resources adolescents draw on to define community and…

Educational issues were studied as related to women in one visible minority population in the Vancouver area--recent immigrants from the Punjab state in India. The 10-month demonstration project involving 13 participants is analyzed in terms of five research topics: participation in the program, Punjabi-English biliteracy, classroom instruction…

Presents a study designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of Incidental Teaching (IT) procedures which are meant to facilitate child initiated language in the nursery classroom. States that IT strategies work well in multi-ethnic classes and that careful rearrangement of the classroom environment encourages student initiated conversation. (GEA)

Studies patterns of frequent mistakes in the use of articles in English by speakers of Hindi/Punjabi. The control over the definite and indefinite article is examined in relation to their forms and functions. The use of articles is also considered in complex noun phrases and different syntactic structures, and an attempt is made to establish a…

Investigation of how 19 adult males listened to and recognized unknown foreign languages (Farsi, Punjabi, Spanish, Indonesian, Arabic, Urdu) indicated that the untrained listeners made complex judgments in describing, transcribing, and identifying phonetic, segmental, suprasegmental, and other impressionistic language details. (Author/CB)

This is an interim report of a special program to assist newly-arrived immigrant children from the Punjab in India. It describes a homogeneous class enrolling twenty pupils, all of East Indian origin and between five and eight years of age. The teacher of the Punjabi-English class kept an extensive anecdotal record of the growth and development of…

When teaching English as a second language to speakers of Punjabi, it is useful for the teacher to have some knowledge of the students' native language. This paper analyzes the differences in word order between English and Punjabi. The five basic sentence patterns in English are contrasted with the equivalent sentence patterns in Punjabi.…

Reports findings from an action research project that set up an instructional program for Punjabi-speaking women immigrants and traced their English and literacy development in classroom and home settings. Data indicate that efforts to teach and acquire literacy focused on language code; self-control strategies and schematic representations for…

This paper reports results of an analysis of pronunciation problems and error patterns in the recorded speech of 38 immigrants to Sweden. The recordings, of both spontaneous and elicited speech in Swedish, were taken from an archival collection. The native-language groups studied include British English, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Persian,…

This paper discusses the development and testing of a literacy unit in basic English as a second language (ESL) for Canadian farmworkers based on the Freirian principles of designing adult education curriculum. The Freirian approach looks at adult learners in the context of their daily reality and uses literacy as a vehicle for the students'…