This work is intended to find replies to practical questions, such as how well native speakers of Spanish are decoded by native speakers of English, which errors interfere with decoding by the listener, and what the implications of the study might be for teaching. Fifteen Chileans were asked to tell stories in English, and several panels of native…

Twenty-five Spanish-speaking English as a Second Language (ESL) students in a California high school were the subjects of a study to determine the effectiveness of an audiovisual as opposed to an audiolingual method. After pretesting, to ensure that the subjects had approximately the same proficiency level, the students were divided into a control…

Progress in the teaching of oral comprehension depends partly on the isolation of factors which block comprehension. Research in conjunction with an experimental course in English as a second language led to the definition of errors due to: (1) insufficient knowledge of the language and the cultural context of its use, and (2) a failure to…

Although linguistic analysis is only indirectly useful for language teaching, it is directly useful to the language teacher. What language teachers hope to gain from linguistic studies are insights into the language and how it works and functions, so that they can make use of this information when formulating teaching techniques. With this…

The main objective of this manual, which contains 39 lessons, is to provide interesting exercises for practice in English segmental phonemes. Sounds are taught first within the context of individual words with emphasis on aural recognition and oral reproduction. The vocabulary is then used within the context of phrases and sentences to accustom…

The 19 papers in this collection cover diversified topics in the general area of psychology and second language learning. No single method of language teaching emerges, but the complexity of second language behavior and the importance of psychology in the field are underlined. Several trends seem to be most prevalent. There is a new focus on the…

Could corpus analysis be used to solve some of the problems surrounding non-native speakers' understanding of seemingly synonymous words? This research is needed because there is no single universal unified lexical theory that can be applied to the study of semantics or of language as a whole. Instead, there are a variety of views than can be…

The Center for Applied Linguistics, in Cooperation with Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, undertook to cover experimentally, for a period of 18 months, foreign language Journal material on applied linguistics published in Central and Eastern Europe and to select for abstracting, and in some cases, translation, articles of particular…

Recent evaluations of the influence of linguistics on language teaching indicate that there is a growing gulf between the two fields. Linguistics failed to provide a sound theoretical foundation for language teaching; it did not alter the content of language teaching, nor did it successfully modify the attitudes of teachers. The parameters of the…

This paper is an attempt to show what parameters come into play when dealing with the problem of difficulty in foreign language learning. After subjecting the hierarchy of difficulty set up by R.P. Stockwell and J.D. Bowen to a critical examination, the author discusses various parameters such as individual and national difficulties, the…

Examing the relationship between linguistic functions and other complex mental and emotional processes such as intellect, conceptual behavior, personality differences, egocentricity, and other important facets of cognitive and affective behavior may lead to the description of "psychologically" real grammatical structures which relate directly to…

A survey investigated the attitudes of educated Greeks about possible modifications in the orthographic representation of written Greek. Subjects were 82 students enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program in English Language and Literature offered at the University of Cyprus. The subjects were administered a 20-item Likert-type questionnaire…

This publication consists of a collection of 18 papers in English, German, Swedish, and Finnish originally presented at a 1988 symposium of the Finnish Association of Applied Linguistics (AFinLA), which was organized jointly by the University of Vaasa and the Department of Teacher Education at Abo Akademi, Finland. Papers focus on the following…

Seven original research papers are presented. The titles and authors are as follows: "Acquisition of the Argument-Structure of Verbs" (Mika Endo); "A Note on Semantic Selection" (Yoshio Endo); "The Governing Category Parameter in Second Language" (Makiko Hirakawa); "The Use of Connectives in English Academic…

This discussion of bilingualism and second language learning concerns many linguistic considerations that figure in the problem of language instruction. The author reports on current research and on the ideas of several noted linguists. Topics considered in this study are the goals of the bilingual education program, reasons for becoming…