Increasingly, Chinese students are pursuing their studies abroad in English-speaking countries, such as the USA, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Despite the fact that they have studied English as a compulsory subject for a number of years and have passed multiple English proficiency tests, many still find it is difficult to communicate well in…

Physical aspects of listening skills are described, including speech rate, syllable tone, word-word separation vs. joining, listening for "focus," word clues per message, and intonation. (LB)

Listeners judged whether they heard a terminal fall, rise, or a flat final intonation contour in 9 sentences produced by 8 deaf children, aged 8-18. The more slowly the contour fell, the more likely listeners were to perceive the contour as flat, regardless of the amount by which it fell. (Author/JDD)

A study of the order of acquisition and fossilization of several French forms by anglophone students focused on the intonative aspect of interlanguage and the transfer of learning from one language to another. (MSE)

Ten infants aged 8-12 months were studied to determine whether they would spontaneously imitate the average fundamental frequency or fundamental frequency contour of their speaking partners. Acoustic analyses failed to reveal any tendency by the infants to adjust vocal pitch, amplitude, or duration in home or laboratory settings. (Author/JDD)

Question development in English as a second language in four native Spanish-speaking children is described. The English questions initiated by four children differing in English proficiency (two limited English speaking and two fluent English speaking) were examined at two points in time to determine how question use changes in the syntactic,…

To determine how bilingual children display a sense of story in an oral reading activity at home, researchers video- and audio-taped samples of four bilingual Chicano second grade chidren engaged in matched narrative tasks. While the two male and two female children read aloud storybooks in English and Spanish in the home setting, reseachers…

A study to assess the feasibility of the use of low frequencies for teaching foreign language to the hearing impaired is described. The subjects were unimpaired Japanese students, aged 18 and 19, in beginning French language study. Recorded sentences translated into English, French, and Mandarin Chinese were combined in various ways and presented…

A study investigated the phenomenon of learner autonomy in six graduate students in a course in English for academic purposes. Students were developing skills in discourse intonation using a CD-ROM program, designed to encourage autonomous learning. Student interview data suggest that development of explicit knowledge of the language system can…