A study was designed to ascertain whether syntactic avoidance behavior could be demonstrated for two groups of ESL learners (native speakers of Arabic and of Spanish and Portuguese) in accordance with contrastive analysis difficulty predictions. An avoidance pattern was found in accordance with such predictions. (CHK)

Investigates the role of topic-comment structure and the frequency of topic-prominence in the oral interlanguage of Chinese- Japanese-, Korean-, Arabic-, Farsi-, and Spanish-speaking adult students of English as a second language. Results indicate that second language learning is generally characterized by an early topic-comment stage, independent…