Examined the magnitude of the contributions that motivation and attitudes make to achievement in the second language in he research conducted by Gardner and associates. Meta-analysis indicates the relationship of second language achievement to the five attitude/motivation variables from Gardner's socioeductional model. (Author/VWL)

Examines phonological recoding in reading by highly skilled English and French bilinguals. In general, slow second-language (L2) readers were not more dependant upon phonological recoding than L2 readers, L2 presented a heavier working memory processing load for slow readers, and different phonological effects existed for French and for English.…

A study of 220 communication strategies used by 12 Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners indicated that the frequency, type, and effectiveness of strategies employed by learners varied according to their proficiency level and the language distance between the learners' native and second languages. (28 references) (Author/CB)

A native speaker-nonnative speaker conversational adjustment in the relative proportions of information type was examined for its relation to communicative success. Analyses indicated that an increase in the proportion of background detail correlated with comprehension problems for second-language learners. (22 references) (Author/VWL)

Reports the findings of research on the acquisition of French intonation by native speakers of Canadian English and Japanese. Results show that cross-linguistic influence in intonation is of central importance to the learner's acquisition of the target system, and that one should not underestimate the degree of the complexity of that influence.…

This paper examined the assessment of second-language proficiency in 157 research articles published in 5 language journals from 1988 through 1992, finding 4 major conventions for the assessment of language proficiency: (1) impressionistic judgment; (2) institutional status; (3) in-house measures; and (4) standardized test scores. (64 references)…

Administered the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory to 25 bilingual (English/Spanish) and 35 monolingual children who were furnishing data for longitudinal study. Assessment of the degree of overlap between bilingual children's lexical development in their two languages showed that they developed early vocabulary at the same rate as…

Investigation of the use of a multiple-trait scoring procedure to obtain communicative writing profiles of adult nonnative English speakers found that the scoring method was highly reliable in composite assessment, but provided little psychometric support for assessing certain individual writing components. (28 references) (Author/CB)

Presents a study of the relationships among error types, feedback types, and immediate learner repair in four French immersion classrooms at the elementary level. The database is drawn from transcripts of audiotape recordings of 13 French language-arts lessons and 14 subject-matter lessons totaling 18.3 hours and including 921 error sequences.…

Investigates the role in learning of rote-learned formulas or chunks. Data were examined from a longitudinal study of 16 child beginner classroom learners of French for occurrences of three chunks, against which definitional criteria were tried out. These forms were then tracked for two years to chart their breakdown and explore their contribution…

Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second-language (L2) readers. In this study, 48 first-language and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, pre-verbal…

Investigated specific patterns for a reactive approach to form-focused instruction: corrective feedback and its relationship to error types and immediate learner repair. Data is drawn from transcripts of audio recordings made in four French immersion classrooms at the elementary level, totaling 18.3 hours and including 921 error sequences.…

Examines incidental and transitory focus on form. Learner uptake was studied in focus-on-form episodes occurring in 12 hours of communicative English-as-a-Second-Language teaching. Learner uptake was generally high and successful--to a much greater extent than has been reported for immersion classrooms. (Author/VWL)

Students in lower-level Spanish classes completed a questionnaire assessing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for learning Spanish, feelings of autonomy and competence in language learning, integrative orientation, and perceptions of teachers' communication style. Results of a path analysis showed that the more controlling the teacher was…

Examines the impact of interaction enhancement (IE) on the learning of English articles. IE is a treatment that guides learners to focus on form by providing interactional modifications and leads learners to produce modified output within a problem-solving task (strategic interaction). (Author/VWL)