Reports a study investigating how multilingual language learners evaluate their own multilingualism, how they view the interaction of their different languages, and whether they think the different languages help or hinder them when speaking, listening, understanding, or writing the foreign languages. Ways in which these perceptions can be used to…

Papers in this volume include the following: "Constraints on Dative Acquisition by Chinese ESL Learners" (Hua Dong Fan); "The Learnability of Locality Conditions on Quantification" (Thomas Lee); "Do Learning Environments Make a Difference? A Study on the Acquisition of the English Interrogatives by Three Types of Cantonese…

Five papers on linguistics contained in this issue include the following: "Tones for Profoundly Deaf Tone-Language Speakers" (Teresa Y. C. Ching), a study using a simplified speech pattern approach to enhance perception of tonal contrasts in Cantonese; "Word Formation and the Limits of Analytic Equivalence" (Peter Crisp), a…

Part of a 20-year Yugoslav Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project, this study is intended to make students, teachers, textbook writers, and scholars aware of elements in the system of English modals that might cause difficulties to the native Serbocroatian-speaking learner of English. An eclectic method of contrastive analysis consisting of…

Investigated pragmatic transfer in American learners of Japanese responding to compliments. The study used a closed role play to collect interlanguage data from the learners and normative data from Japanese and American native speakers. Findings substantiate a utility of pragmatic transfer research for improving instructional approach and course…

This paper examines the effect of formality in three different situations on the oral production of French interlanguage. An analysis of 39 Dutch-speaking students revealed that, contrary to predictions, the more formal situation does not lead to higher accuracy rates. (23 references) (Author)

A study to determine the role of oral language and reading skills in the transfer from two years of reading in Spanish to reading in English had as subjects 191 fourth grade students in a bilingual education program. Students were tested and classified as efficient and non-efficient readers. It was found that: (1) there is a relationship between…

This report describes the use of the English negative by three adult second language learners, and relates the findings to Schumann's "pidginization hypothesis." This hypothesis states that a particular subject's restricted English was the result of his social and possibly also his psychological distance from English speakers. In order to provide…

Reviews three linguistic studies from 1970s in light of approaches used in 1980s: (1) pretest-posttest analysis of spoken Spanish and English of Mexican American bilingual children; (2) assessment of Spanish grammar among Culver City Spanish Immersion pupils, and (3) effect of summer vacation on Spanish language retention among English speakers…

This study tested a refined version of the discourse domain hypothesis, which defines the discourse domain as a topic area in which second language learners demonstrate extensive, current, and important knowledge, including both cognitive and affective dimensions. The study tested the results of previous studies, which showed that learners show…

The purpose of this periodical publication is to present works in progress by students and professors (generally based on research carried out at the University of Pennsylvania) on topics ranging from speech act analysis and classroom discourse to language planning and second language acquisition. Papers in this volume include the following:…

This study builds on research that identified empirical evidence indicating that at least one language for special purposes (LSP) domain and one non-LSP domain are in fact associated with some differential results in the consequent interlanguage (IL) structure of non-native users of English. The current study focuses on the methodological problems…

A collection of studies of second language acquisition in Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, French, German, and English is presented using a cross-linguistic perspective. The following topics are covered: (1) cross-linguistic first language perspectives on second language acquisition research; (2) use of typological markedness conditions in Swedish as…

In a recent paper (1977) Levenston and Blum suggested that lexical simplification operates according to universal principles, and that these derive from the individual's semantic competence in his mother tongue. This paper examines the validity of this suggestion by means of a comparative study of lexical simplification in three different…

The need for an index of development by which second language proficiency could be expediently and reliably guaged has been acknowledged by both second language (L2) teachers and researchers. In two previous L2 studies, the search for an index of development centered on an examination of learner written performance. In an attempt to construct an…