A discussion of diary studies, research on second language learning and teaching that uses student journals about the learning experience, defines the method, reviews a number of such studies, and examines the pros and cons of this approach. It is noted that diary studies are first-person case study research, a form of empirical (data-based)…

Contrastive rhetoric (CR), the study of cultural influence on written discourse has provided educators with a way to conceptualize and address anomaly in grammatically correct English texts since its birth in the mid-1960s. The development of this notion, particularly in the past 10 years, can be characterized as evolving from a narrow,…

Memory research has recently moved from looking at performance in highly artificial laboratory tasks to examination of tasks in everyday life. One consequence is the development of the concept of "working memory." For the learner, foreign language comprehension makes great demands on working memory capacity. Comprehension of a message requires…

The first contacts between linguistics and second language acquisition date from the period of contrastive analysis of languages, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When contrastive analysis failed as an explanatory model, linguists lost interest in second language research and descriptive/contrastive studies declined, resulting in a changed…

This report has two sections: an account of the meeting on autodidaxy, or self-directed learning; and a collection of studies and papers on the subject. The first part considers the following: (1) the conceptual domain of autodidaxy; (2) the constitutive elements of autodidaxy, and the plurality of definitions attached to it; (3) aspects of…

This paper summarizes the presentations given at the 1974 TESOL Convention, and includes discussion of second language learning universals, statistical techniques for analyzing morphemes, data collection techniques and tests of hypotheses about the nature of the second language learning process. (CK)

Criticizes the philosophy and management of several research projects of the 1960's. The procedures employed by second language learners unconstrained by group arrangements, teacher presentation, or other major interventions in their learning opportunity need to be studied. Only then can a theory of second language learning be constructed.…

In research on second language instruction, the researcher's knowledge of the learner's background has not always been central in data collection. However, data collection is part of a research design that should include both a description of the sample population and the role of the learner in the decision to carry out a given study.…

Most of the now commonplace computer-assisted instruction (CAI) uses computers to increase the capacity to perform logical, numerical, and symbolic computations. However, computers are an interactive and potentially intelligent medium. The implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for learning are more radical than those for traditional CAI. AI…

Lexical semantics and contrastive lexical semantics can serve as a background discipline to describe and, to some extent, to explain errors in interlanguage. Two developments in lexical semantics that are relevant in this area are the description of sense-relationships and componential analysis. Contrastive lexical semantics involves mapping the…

Partial results are presented of a study investigating the relationship between an oral interview and a cloze test in Hebrew and focusing on issues related to the oral interview procedure. An oral interview speaking test and cloze tests were administered to 106 students of Hebrew at the University of Minnesota. The taped interviews were rated by…

Research on the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development is reviewed, and two complementary models of bilingualism are developed to account for research results. It is suggested that research since 1960 shows a positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development, at least for some types of bilingualism. The advantage or…

Reviews some of the current literature on the sociolinguistic aspects of ESL. (RM)

Part II of the first author's PhD dissertation, submitted to McGill University, Montreal, Canada (1965).

This study concerns a moment in the learning process which is considered crucial, namely, that point when the learner is confronted with the necessity of discovering from the models already learned and stored in memory elements that will be useful in constructing a new utterance or solving a new problem. The emphasis is on the point of connection…