Reviews the different categories of native pauses and describes techniques for incorporating them cautiously into the spoken French of anglophones (especially Americans), suggesting that proper pause behavior is actually a definite mark of authentic sounding and well-controlled speech. (Author/CB)

Presents a proposal to bring literature into the basic program of instruction and make it a meaningful component of the learning process. A model lesson describes how literary texts can be perceived and studied as performances of a language. (CB)

Provides a statistical portrait of residents of the United States who speak a language other than English, including the degree of their fluency in English. The analysis is based on the microdata files from the 1990 Census of Population. The data reveal that a continuation of current migration patterns will result in both linguistic concentration…

The "fourth grade slump" in reading comprehension still exists. Among poor children, low comprehension ruins their chances for academic success. Among all children, comprehension scores are stagnant. Research indicates that key to both problems is systematically building children's vocabulary, fluency, and domain knowledge. To improve reading,…

Discusses culture, its linguistic representation, intercultural communication, and the requirements these three set for foreign-language teaching. The author illustrates that true communication requires awareness and sensitivity to cultural, as well as language-differences. (GR)

The use of distance education for clinical skills development in the health professions has not been extensively described, due in part to the intensive nature of the relationship between the patient and practitioner. In the context of pharmacy practice, there are specific needs to develop new vehicles for clinical skills education due to growing…

This article describes the benefits of teaching nursery rhymes to students, particularly as it relates to language and sound patterns. Most cultures have parallel forms of nursery rhymes, limericks and simple poetry that children easily understand and enjoy. Yet teachers of young children report that many of their students do not know a single…

To help provide writing instruction to elementary school children who are taught English as a second language, a writing project was designed for three ESL students: a third grader from Japan, a fourth grader from Costa Rica, and a fifth grader from Indonesia. The goals of the project were to help the students find writing to be enjoyable and…

This paper describes two Internet-based French language courses that help students acquire fluency in a nontraditional format. The Annenberg/CPB Project's "French in Action Online" was originally offered as a free online adjunct to a television course. The Coastline Community College's French 186AB French Topics Online is a stand-alone…

Gives an overview of the development and testing of an interview instrument used by teachers of English as a second language to assess the oral proficiency of nonnative speakers. (The actual instrument is reprinted in the article that follows this one). (SK)

Despite the popularity English holds in Germany and the advantage English teaching has over teaching in other countries, students often lack fluency and confidence in their use of the language. The "bilingual" program aims to develop communicative skills and familiarize students with English-speaking countries' culture. The development…

Discusses a study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Findings indicate the presence of disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in the corpus of recorded speech data. It is concluded that speech is not overly laden with errors, and there is nothing in the data to mislead the language…

The Monterey Institute's International Studies curriculum is described in terms of its foreign language fluency requirements for business master's degree candidates and the school's use of language in international business negotiation training and other exercises involving foreign affairs. Illustrations reveal the school's success in educating…

Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically, researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively…

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be…