Study results indicate that motivation and attitudinal factors are critical in predicting students' success in beginning Japanese. Classroom personality factors such as risk taking and discomfort were also found to be determinants of the students' final grades. (27 references) (Author/LB)

Reviews research on the nature of attention and memory and proposes a model of the relationship between them during second-language acquisition complementary to Schmidt's noticing hypothesis and oppositional to Krashen's dual-system hypothesis. The article maintains that differential performance on implicit and explicit learning and memory…

Examines error gravity research design and its theoretical assumptions. Results indicate that investigators have only skimmed the surface of the process of error evaluation, which is shaped by extralinguistic factors. The article concludes that researchers should reconceptualize error gravity research and reassess earlier studies to confirm or…

Raises three questions concerning the present state of second-language acquisition research: (1) What has it achieved for language teaching? (2) How close is a theory of second-language acquisition? (3) What is its status within the chorus of disciplines that deal with language? (Author/JL)

This study presents and tests a hypothesized structural model that attempts to explain the relationship of writing in English as a foreign language by Taiwanese university students to a variety of factors. Investigated were factors considered to be inhibiting (writing apprehension and writer's block), factors considered to be facilitative (free…

In a test administered to Spanish-speaking students of English as a second language at the elementary and intermediate levels, the results indicated the subjects' reliance on the strategies of overgeneralization and transfer was qualitatively different. Implications of the results are discussed. (Author/RM)

A test administered to 73 adults learning English as a second language revealed a highly consistent order of relative difficulty in the use of eight functors across different language backgrounds. This study also confirmed earlier results indicating that children and adults use common strategies and process linguistic data similarly. (Author/KM)

Presents results of the fourth evaluation of trilingual school programs in French, Hebrew, and English being offered on an experimental basis in several elementary schools in Montreal. (Author/AM)

Presents one solution to the problem of eliciting, classifying, and measuring language learning errors in a longitudinal study, and, in addition, seeks to isloate particular difficulties of adult Iranian learners of English. (AM)

Discusses the shortcomings of the morpheme order approach in first and second language acquisition research, and proposes instead the notion of developmental sequence, drawing on examples from data on four German children learning English naturalistically. (Author/AM)

Analysis of responses to two cloze tests administered to native and non-native speakers of English revealed that non-natives were far less capable of coping with the loss of redundant cohesive data than were natives. Nonnatives were more reliant on text in comprehension process than were native speakers. (Author/CB)

Assesses the influence of religious-specific background knowledge on adult ESL listening comprehension. Sixteen Moslems, 20 Christians, and 28 religion-neutral students listened to two passages, one on prayer rituals of Islam and one on those of Christianity. Students better recalled and understood the passage related to their respective religious…

Discusses the design and interpretation of instrumental phonetic studies of second language (L2) speech production. The speech of L2 learners is evaluated to determine to what extent it diverges from the differing phonetic norms of L1, which are estimated from the speech of a small number of native speakers. (Author/LMO)

Reports on a study of the influence of cognitive/affective variables on the second language learning ability of adults. Two variables, field independence and ambiguity tolerance, were found to be significant predictors of English as a second language proficiency for international students studying in the United States. (SED)

Explored the relationship of similarity, dissimilarity, and markedness to second language, specifically English, phonological acquisition. The article hypothesized that the rate of acquisition for a dissimilar phenomenon is faster than for a similar phenomenon. Findings revealed that degree of markedness can increase or decrease rate. (38…