I was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was eight years old. You could say I was sort of born into it, as my father, mother, seven other siblings, and both sets of grandparents are all members as well. I grew up in a small, rural town in Southern Idaho where vegetation is almost as sparse as non-LDS families. As children we were never quite sure which denomination these families belonged to: that they were not Mormon was the only distinction we made. As I was growing up my parents saw to it that I attended the three-hour long Church services every Sunday, the weekly youth activities, and our local four-year seminary program. After completing high school, I chose to pursue my academic studies at two Church-owned and operated institutions of higher learning, first at Ricks College and then Brigham Young University. But it seemed that the pinnacle of my Church education would take place when my twenty first birthday finally enabled me to become a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The intent of this study was to develop a sixty minute, mediated practical first aid teaching unit for the missionary system of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This study addresses the following questions; 1) How does reading The Book of Mormon Diglot Reader compare with reading the Spanish translation of The Book of Mormon in terms of degree of anxiety, frustration, and discouragement experienced by the reader? 2) Will the missionaries using the Diglot Reader experience a greater increase in the amount of Book of Mormon vocabulary acquired as compared with the vocabulary increase experienced by the missionaries who only read from the standard Spanish translation of The Book of Mormon? 3) Does the use of the Diglot Reader increase the missionaries' ability to understand sentences from The Book of Mormon in Spanish compared to the missionaries who do not use the Diglot Reader?

Since the instigation of the first language training mission in December, 1961, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been vitally interested in the language instruction of its missionaries. As the number of missionaries called to foreign missions increased, the need for more facilities and instruction grew rapidly. During the week of January 18, 1969, Elder Spencer W. Kimball, Chairman of the Church Missionary Committee, announced expansion of the language training mission program that would go into effect on February 8 of that same year. Languages would not only be taught at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, but also at Ricks College, Rexburg, Idaho, and at the Church College of Hawaii at Laie. Seven languages are taught at the Language Training Mission in Provo; five languages are taught at the Language Training Mission in Rexburg; and seven languages are taught at the Language Training Mission in Laie. The programs to train missionaries to speak a foreign language are diversified and thorough. One of the reasons the missionaries are successful in learning their target language is because of the training they receive at the language training missions. These programs have expanded and grown over the years. Although the main goal of all the language training missions is the same, that of teaching the missionaries the various languages, the roads to that goal are somewhat samewhat different. There is a definite need to compile and correlate the different materials and programs used by these three language larguage training missions. A comparison of the programs might be helpful to mission leaders in gaining new ideas about how to better train missionaries to learn their target languages more effectively. Perhaps such a comparison would also generate many more ideas to further other facets of the missionary program. An attempt will be made to show only a comparison between the programs of the three missions. There will be no attempt to draw any conclusions as to how the work should or should not be accomplished. Goals common to all of the missions will be analyzed separately, and an explanation of how each of the missions attains that goal by the use of various programs will be discussed.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University, Dept. of Graduate Studies in Religious Instruction.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University, Dept. of Graduate Studies in Religious Instruction, 1968. / "Reprinted 1997." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-90).

This thesis is a set of materials in colloquial Aymara, an indigenous language spoken by nearly one million people on the "altiplano" of Bolivia and southeastern Peru. It is designed for use by missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assigned to the Bolivia Mission. It was prepared on the assumption that missionaries will have completed approximately three weeks of intensive Spanish language training prior to beginning this course.Each lesson has a pre-class module which previews the vocabulary, grammar, and memorization assignments found in the in-class module, and increases the student's listening comprehension. The in-class module is divided into cycles, each of which begins with a microwave model and subsequent explanation of the grammar point under consideration. The repetition drills are followed by response drills, where answers must correspond to the truth value established in the preceding repetition drill. Controlled conversations, personalized questions and activities follow which are designed to lead the student step by step toward practical and meaningful communication.

Two control groups and two experimental groups of missionaries and teachers participated in a study comparing a grammar-based method of teaching to a context-based method. The study lasted for two weeks during June 1997. Each classroom was recorded using a timing-based observation system that captured 13 missionary and teacher language behaviors. The behaviors were recorded in real time and later evaluated to determine in which classroom setting the most real communication occurred. A second purpose was to determine the effectiveness of teacher training with respect to teachers in the experimental group. Findings revealed that missionaries in the context-based classroom received and participated in a significantly greater amount of meaningful language interactions, while missionaries in the control groups spend a significantly greater amount of time participating in rote-type language interactions. Furthermore, data suggests that by training the experimental teachers, their confidence and teaching ability improved. Data also suggested a relation between teacher language behaviors and missionary behaviors. Suggestions are made regarding further application of the context-based curriculum and teacher training and observation mechanisms as to what developers will need to include in a broader implementation of this study.

One may well wonder how these missionaries adjust themselves again to their daily routine of life. What is the religious, economic, and educational status of these returned missionaries? The purpose, therefore, of this study is to discover facts which might show the present religious, economic, and educational status of fity-seven returned missionaries of Idaho Stake in Bannock County, Idaho. Associated with these aspects under study are certain beliefs and practices to which the present reaction of the missionary is reported. Because of the very nature of the questions asked, the writer discovered the inability of the respondent in some cases to determine accurately the truth. Such data are reported as opinions only and are given for what they may be worth. Succeeding sections show how the terms, religious, economic, and educational are delimited.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University, Dept. of Graduate Studies in Religious Instruction. / Electronic thesis. Also available in print ed.