The new market place has dictated on adults the use of English as it is the first international language used in business. However, learning a foreign language becomes more and more complicated as the learner gets older, is in a mature command of L1 and L2, and does not have enough time to learn due to professional responsibilities. Contrary to…

The patterns of acquisition of the passe compose and imperfect tenses in French among 16 adult beginning and intermediate students were studied. Based on 15-minute speech samples in which both verb tenses were elicited by seeded questions and cues for descriptive and narrative monologues, the intermediate learners had greater success with the…

Research pertaining to adult second-language learning from television is reviewed. It is proposed that course design and marketing must begin with considerations of basic factors such as students' needs, nature of the target language, the uses to be made of the language, and the linguistic skills being taught. Decisions can be made best by keeping…

The aim of this article is to explain what the term "languages for special purposes" means and what it does not mean, to outline the rationale for such a branch of language teaching and to indcate some of the problems it poses for syllabus planners and course designers. Four principal types of problems and considerations are identified and…