Describes a French diction and oral communication course conducted at Franklin and Marshall College. Originally envisioned as a "necessary evil" to train students to write and deliver seminar papers, the course unexpectedly appealed to students as a practical experience while developing increased student interest in French language and literature.…

Describes a one-semester conversational course taught at Harvard University designed to teach basic oral communication skills in French with the main emphasis on teaching students to pause while speaking. (AM)

Describes a college English-as-a-Second-Language curriculum model based on a whole-language approach that is presented to stimulate others to review and revise their own curriculum. (25 references) (GLR)

Describes a speech course conducted recently with a group of Chinese graduate students who have minimal experience with spoken English. The students were highly competent in their field of study--engineering--but displayed low oral proficiency in English. The course encourages repetition of utterances and focuses on voice quality and reduced forms…

A graduate level course offered to foreign medical graduates (FMGs) at Wayne State University in Michigan was developed after a needs assessment indicated the desirability of improving the speaking fluency, pronunciation, and cultural understanding of FMGs. It was found that weaknesses in those areas, which are not assessed in the Test of English…

This paper describes the techniques used in a successful, intensive course in introductory Russian. The objectives of the course are to develop good pronunciation and oral communication skills, good listening comprehension skills, some fluency in reading, and some elementary skill in writing. The course relies upon the development of a community…

This paper describes the method adopted in a short course to improve group interaction in the foreign language classroom by giving students the opportunity to engage in group interaction and in this way sensitizing them to group dynamics. It provides the outline and rationale of the course, a detailed description of one unit, and evaluation…