The power and status of America in the world today are undeniable. This paper presents some empirical data about the attitudes and perceptions Danish learners of EFL have about British and American English. Ninety-six EFL learners participated in a verbal-guise experiment that involved rating different accents of English: American, Australian,…

Jamaica is a Creole-speaking environment, where children enter school with a range of varieties, some of which are closely related to English. The expectation is that they will learn English in school. The appropriate language teaching approach, it is argued, is not English as a mother tongue, English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign…

In this study we identify some of the phonetic parameters that correlate with nonnative speakers' (NNSs) perceptual judgments of accent in English and investigate NNS listener perceptions of English from a World Englishes point of view. Our main experiment involved 3,200 assessments of the perceived degree of accent in English of two speaker…

This article deals with modelling and specificity in K-12 teacher education to describe an approach in ESL/EFL teaching which is aimed at assisting teachers in bridging the gap between declarative and procedural knowledge while addressing the complex requirements of their learners. It is concluded that descriptions of language variation across…

Papers in this issue include the following: "Code-Mixing in Hongkong Cantonese-English Bilinguals: Constraints and Processes" (Brian Chan Hok-shing); "Information on Quantifiers and Argument Structure in English Learner's Dictionaries" (Thomas Hun-tak Lee); "Systematic Variability: In Search of a Linguistic…

There is a great deal of knowledge required to send or receive a message of "no." The acquisition of communicative competence, i.e., the ability to interpret the full meaning of a message and the ability to properly formulate such messages, requires three levels of knowledge. These three levels are all needed in the interpretation of the…

The French of English speaking students of French as a second language is compared with "francais populaire" (FP) in order to determine similarities in their tendency toward simplified grammar and morphology. Simplifying characteristics that are typical of FP were obtained from French working class sources, while simplification patterns…

This article discusses comprehension problems encountered by students of French as a second language as a result of the mismatch between the standard language they learn in classrooms and the language used by native speakers. (CLK)

This paper reports on two phases of a study of a group of advanced TEFL (teachers-of-English-as-a-foreign-language) students. To raise their awareness of the importance of discourse intonation while they were receiving teacher training, this study focuses on examining their sociocultural and psychological inclinations in the choice of phonological…

Points to the power struggles in the teaching of Englishes and the training of language professionals in expanding, outer, and inner circle contexts of English use. Argues that these conflicts are ethical in nature and that a framework for addressing them must be incorporated into the theory and practice of language teaching and teacher training.…

The oral proficiency interview (OPI) has been submitted to external scrutiny and has been accepted by many foreign language educators as an accurate method of assessing speaking competence of foreign language learners. An OPI is herein examined in the context of evaluating native speakers. (seven references) (JL)

Four instructional ideas for use in the French second-language classroom are described, including an exercise in the temporal aspect of French past tenses; part of a series on simulating a French village community; a verb tense drill set in the context of a murder mystery; and an exercise in current French street slang. (MSE)

Raises three questions concerning the present state of second-language acquisition research: (1) What has it achieved for language teaching? (2) How close is a theory of second-language acquisition? (3) What is its status within the chorus of disciplines that deal with language? (Author/JL)

This article examines the sociolinguistic competence of French immersion students. We first present an overview of the range of variation found in L1 speech and make a distinction between vernacular, informal, formal, and hyper-formal variants. We then compare the use of these forms in the speech of Canadian francophones and Grade 9 and 12…

The history, culture and practices of Central America are inadequately addressed in teacher preparation and professional development across the United States, and especially in California based on the author's analysis of teacher preparation. Information about the histories, cultures and practices add to the linguistic and pedagogic knowledge-base…