With President George W. Bush's unprecedented call in January 2006 to expand the foreign language capacity of the United States, it has become clear that languages other than English (LOE) are of great interest to public policy in the United States. Yet the language capacity of the United States remains poorly documented. The 2000 General Social…

According to "noun-cue" models, arbitrary linguistic categories, like those associated with case and gender systems, are difficult to learn unless members of the target category (i.e., nouns) are marked with phonological or semantic cues that reliably co-occur with grammatical morphemes (e.g., determiners) that exemplify the categories. "Syntactic…

This study investigates the effect of the context of learning--"at home" (AH) classroom versus study abroad (SA)--on the number and types of communication strategies (CSs) used by learners of Spanish as a second language. Oral data from 46 learners--20 AH and 26 SA--were analyzed before and after the treatment period, to discern the effect of…

Validation of a classroom observation measure for use with English Learners (ELs) in grade 1 was the focus of this study. Fourteen teachers were observed during reading and language arts instruction with an instrument used to generate ratings of instructional quality on a number of dimensions. In these classrooms we assessed the reading…

The major purpose of this study is to assist college students in constructing mental representation of referential resolution in a computer system. Ninety students were asked to draw mental maps indicating the relationships between references, take reading comprehension tests, and fill out open-ended questionnaire. Results showed that the…

The social reform and opening-up in Chinese society in the last three decades have resulted in overall changes in almost every aspect of social life of its people. As an important indicator in these changes, English has become an important tool in education for students to move ahead to a higher level of schooling, and better jobs in the…

A study investigated correlations between students' and parents' attitudes toward the Hebrew language, students' attitudes and achievement in Hebrew, attitude differences in boys and girls, and attitude differences of students in the third and fourth years of Hebrew study. Parents and students in four Chicago-area supplementary Hebrew schools were…

Assessment of fourth-year pupils in two neighboring London schools (one grammar, one comprehensive) over a full academic year indicated that student attitudes, motivation, and proficiency, often influenced by placement in ability groups, significantly affected second-language learning. (Author/CB)

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)

A review of recent classroom research regarding writing processes reveals ways in which contextual factors affect student learning. Teachers should investigate the relationship between teaching and writing development in their own classrooms. (Author/CB)

Considers both qualitative and quantitative research approaches on second language learning, with focus on second language classroom research. Concludes that both approaches are relevant to determining the important variables to investigate and the relationships those variables have to second language learning outcomes. (Author/CB)

Investigated the correlation between global foreign accent (GFA) and voice onset time (VOT). VOT values for /p/, /t/, and /k/ were measured at two times, separated by an interval of 42 months. Subjects were 11 Japanese speakers of English as a foreign language; 5 age-matched native speakers of English served as the control group. (Author/VWL)

In this study of German as a foreign language, formal classroom experience is compared with informal use of German outside the classroom focusing on three syntactic features: main clause word order (subject-verb-object, or SVO), topicalization (subject-verb inversion), and subordinate word order (subject-object-verb, or SOV). T tests and…

English-speaking Pakistani university students responded to the Sahin-Francis Attitude toward Islam Scale, along with other religious measures and a social desirability scale. This scale was multidimensional. Correlations with religious measures confirmed its validity and were not explained by a social desirability response set. These data…

This study acoustically analyzed the production of single and geminate stops in Japanese by English-speaking children (N = 19) at three different grade levels in a Japanese immersion program. Results show that both their singletons and geminates were significantly longer than those of Japanese monolinguals and the bilinguals' immersion teachers,…