The first part of a larger planned investigation, this study examines the use of "por" and "para" by nine Peace Corps volunteers in oral interviews at the end of training and roughly one year later, to trace their acquisition over time, in two learning contexts. (24 references) (LB)

Explores ring games--where participants form a circle, sing, dance, and take turns entering the circle--and how they can be used in the second-language classroom. The playful integration of vocalization and rhythmic body movement can have a powerful influence on speech fluency. (Author/VWL)

Describes an a second-language-learning activity called "Speak Out" that students have used successfully to achieve fluency in the English-as-a-Second-Language classroom. "Speak Out" is a 30-minute speaking activity that works well in an integrative skill program. The objective is to improve students' fluency through…

This research note reports on a study to investigate what English language skills are used by new graduate employees in their daily work in various departments in four banks in Hong Kong. Through interviews with 16 new bank employees across these four banks and the use of questionnaires, my aim was to determine what proportion of their daily…

Discusses the validity of a rating scale created by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages for the purpose of measuring the oral language proficiency of bilingual professionals who are speakers of English and Spanish. Notes that this scale measures various levels of competence and features of an individual's speech. (14…

Compared to 19 controls, 21 dyslexic boys, age 11-18, were as successful in naming parts of objects in drawings, and they had no distinctive difficulty over homophones or homographs. However, subjects did produce more distortions of words, examples of inappropriate usage, incomplete sentences, repetitions, and other errors. (Author/JDD)

Examines the difficulty foreign language learners of Spanish experience in distinguishing between indicative and subjunctive moods after four semesters of study. An analysis of two oral production tasks suggests that, at this intermediate level, they are unlikely to possess enough linguistic foundation to fully benefit from instruction in mood…

This study explored a holistic model of English reading comprehension among a sample of 135 Spanish-English bilingual Latina and Latino 4th-grade students This model took into account Spanish language reading skills and language of initial literacy instruction. Controlling for language of instruction, English decoding skill, and English oral…

Compares 39 native teachers' and 41 native nonteachers' perception of elementary learners' spoken Japanese. Interviews between a native speaker and a learner were audiotaped, and the 80 natives evaluated them according to grammar, fluency, vocabulary, appropriateness, comprehensibility and pronunciation. Results indicate teachers are more critical…

Explores the effect of individual speaking style on the self-correction behavior of second-language speakers. The project involved 30 Hungarian learners of English studying at various levels of proficiency and made use of self-report data. (Author/VWL)

Analyzes changes in oral communication skills of five American adult learners who participated in a five-week study abroad program in Spanish. Subjective analysis of recordings of participants upon their return show that four participants increased their command of the vocabulary and were more at ease in discourse interaction. (14 references)…

In this study of German as a foreign language, formal classroom experience is compared with informal use of German outside the classroom focusing on three syntactic features: main clause word order (subject-verb-object, or SVO), topicalization (subject-verb inversion), and subordinate word order (subject-object-verb, or SOV). T tests and…

Building on previous studies of the effects of planning on second language (L2) learners' oral narratives and drawing on Kellog's (1996) model of writing, this article reports a study of the effects of three types of planning conditions (pretask planning, unpressured on-line planning, and no planning) on 42 Chinese learners' written narratives…

Provides an inventory of traditional techniques used in the teaching of pronunciation of English as a second language. Most of the techniques are production-oriented, for their purpose is to improve production of spoken English. (CB)

Many would argue that the state of urban science education has been static for the past several decades and that there is little to learn from it. Rather than accepting this deficit perspective, this book strives to recognize and understand the successes that exist there by systematically documenting seven years of research into issues salient to…