Barbara Redmond, age 16, of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for her question:

WHAT ARE LANGUAGE ARTS?

"Language arts" is a term used in American elementary and secondary education to refer to training in reading, writing and speaking, as distinguished from training in literary appreciation and scholarship.

The term also is used in many colleges and universities, where it is sometimes called programs in communications.

Language arts freely utilize all knowledge, especially the social sciences and psychology, in the study of language and literature.

Beyond the elementary stages of reading, writing and speaking, the language arts include a variety of topics: phonetics (for the improvement of pronunciation), remedial reading, linguistics, semantics (for the improvement of comprehension), creative writing and bibliotherapy (the study of the kinds of reading that promote emotional growth and health).

Language arts also include literature as a source of psychological and social insights (rather than exclusively as an art), the effects of mass communication (motion pictures, newspapers, radio and TV) and the relations between language and culture.