American and Canadian research is reviewed concerning the language needs of native primary students entering English schools from homes where a language other than English is spoken, and a study is reported that contrasted the language performance of children entering school from homes where only English is spoken and from homes where a language…

The test described here is a particular type of diagnostic test; it is part of a series of tests designed to explore systematically areas of potential lexical difficulty in the English language for French-speaking students of English. The lexical units are considered under their formal, morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. The test has…

This final report summarizes the research carried out between September 1971 and August 31, 1972, on the second language programs (French), of the English schools of the Ottawa Roman Catholic Separate School Board. Eight immersion classes and forty-seven classes receiving 75 minutes of French daily at the first grade level, and five immersion…

This resource book is intended to be used with the companion program guide, and is so arranged that it can be put in a loose leaf binder and incorporated with other notes. It is divided as follows: (1) a discussion in outline form of prescribed material including three methods of organizing the program, a complete indication of the contents of the…

One hundred twenty first-grade Mexican-American students (60 from each Fort Worth and Laredo, Texas) were subjects of an experiment which attempted to determine whether bilingualism inhibits verbal ability in one or both of the children's languages. The PPVT-A (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Form A) was used to test verbal ability and…

Distractors, the incorrect responses to an item on a multiple-choice test, should be designed to create confusion in the minds of some students and to permit a competent student to be able to see that they are wrong. It is possible, by close scrutiny, to isolate the sources of this confusion and, by looking at a statistical analysis, to find out…

This document reports on the foreign language training offered in the Peace Corps. Following a brief introductory statement, a list of languages taught by the Peace Corps in the years 1961-67 is provided, as well as a brief description of Peace Corps language training methods. Guidelines for language coordinators are outlined, and the approach to…

This guide first points out the difficulty and the lack of reliability involved in using tests to evaluate the abilities of children from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Suggestions are then given for using existing evaluation techniques to test the English language proficiency of children at kindergarten level. The following…

In an attempt to deal with the current foreign language enrollment and learning problems created by the number of students who discontinue foreign language study after the sixth to eighth grade learning sequence, this pilot study seeks to identify, through the use of the Modern Language Aptitude Test and the Foreign Language Attitude Scale with…

Intended as a comprehensive introduction to the construction and use of foreign language tests, this book utilizes modern linguistic knowledge as a base for scientific language testing. Major attention in testing is focused on such integrated language skills as auditory and reading comprehension, speaking, writing, translation, and over-all…

This collection of 50 articles by 45 authors, largely from the United Kingdom and America, serves as an introduction for teachers preparing to teach English as a second or foreign language, or for administrators planning a program of English study as a second language. The readings are grouped in nine sections, each with an overview, according to…

Within the framework of viewing communicative competence as a prerequisite to linguistic competence, rather than vice versa, this paper considers the following: (1) the nature of communicative competence; (2) the implications of communicative competence for second language teaching; and (3) ways in which the teacher can begin to make a foreign…

The present study deals with two language skills, listening and speaking, and it is limited to single consonant phonemes only. The purpose is to try to find answers to the following problems: (1) Which Finnish consonants are given as substitutes for English consonants by Finnish pupils who have no previous (or practically no previous) knowledge of…

This paper presents empirical data concerning the use of a cloze test as a measure of second language proficiency. Grade four students in their fifth year of a French immersion program were tested using both English and French cloze tests. Correlations between the cloze test and other language achievement measures were calculated for both…

This is a summary in outline form of the English literature teaching situation in Pakistan. As a legacy of British rule, officially all instruction is in English, but a great deal is carried on in Urdu or provincial languages. Attachment to English language and literature is still strong among the educated elite. This contrasts with the attitudes…