This article discusses the history and changes in the teaching of Chinese in the United States. It suggests that there is 1 standard Chinese language and no need to learn dialects, but that to be literate in Chinese means learning 3,500 characters. (CK)

Discusses changes that have occurred with regard to issues of language acquisition in Kenya in the last several decades, and the challenges these changes pose for educators and linguists today. Evaluates discrepancies that exist between theoretical norms and actual language behavior, especially as they affect the English language. Solutions to…

Twelve languages--including the two prestigious colonial languages, English and French, a French-based creole and "ancestral" languages, such as Hindi and Mandarin--are spoken on the multiethnic island Mauritius. Given the multilingual and multiethnic nature of the nation, linguistic practices are an important way for Mauritians to…

In the area of language teaching, a large number of learner corpora investigations have tended to rely on empirical data to identify common types of errors which illustrate inauthentic usages in a target language. One consequence of this kind of investigations is that such studies rarely, if ever, consider the inextricable link between language…

This study examines the perception of English vowels by native speakers of Italian. In two preliminary experiments, Italian university students who had lived in Canada for 3 months were found to have difficulty discriminating because they often identified both members of each contrast as instances of a single Italian vowel. The participants in two…

This monograph describes the language planning situation in Nigeria, one of the most multilingual countries in Africa. It is divided into four sections. The first section presents the language profile of Nigeria and provides a background of the general language situation in the country. The second section discusses language spread and use. It…

As accountability requirements for determining adequate yearly progress increase, states are working to make standards-based assessments accessible for all students. Providing accommodations on assessments is one of the main ways to allow not only students with disabilities but also students who are English Language Learners to be included in…

The author is presenting a program that she designed for teaching liaison interpreting to translation students in their fifth semester of the translation program at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), who are starting their training in liaison interpreting. The students never had any interpreting or translation training before. The…

This article reports on a study which investigated the language lives of Afrikaans-speaking South African immigrants in New Zealand. Particularly, it focuses on their awareness of and attitudes to language policy in both South Africa and New Zealand, and how these influence their own and their family's language practices. Narrative interviews with…

The testing of grammar is one of the mainstays of language testing, since it can be argued that a basic knowledge of grammar underlies the ability to use language to express meaning. The most common way of testing grammatical knowledge is the multiple-choice test, and the most common multiple-choice item is one in which the student selects a word…

Research was conducted to consider in detail the intergenerational dimensions of bilingualism in the Puerto Rican community in New York City via the children of adult immigrants who had abandoned their native language usage and who later revived it. The issues in focus are language choice, language change, language use, and language learning. The…

A comparison of the usage of English articles and prepositions by native speakers of Finnish and of Finland-Swedish studied the word frequencies of these grammatical categories in three levels of English essays written by school-leavers in Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools in Finland. It was hypothesized that the poorest essays written…

The development and use of verbal and nonverbal communication by children in the early stages of second language acquisition were investigated in a natural setting. Twenty young speakers of Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Spanish, Icelandic, and Polish, enrolled in a multilingual program and ranging in age from 7 to 12 years, served as subjects. All of…

This paper reports a study that investigated the development of second language (L2) communication strategies (code-switching, all-purpose words, word coinage, approximation, and circumlocution) over time. In the study, 8 adult learners in a full-time English as a second language program provided oral narrations of an eight-frame picture story at…

This paper describes some experiences in foreign language teaching based on three objectives: (1) to prove that students have greater language learning potential than they show in the classroom; (2) to put the stress on communication; and (3) to keep the students motivated. The 41 subjects were the students in a beginning German class who met for…