Stresses that learning to understand and speak a foreign language is the acquisition of a skill, not of a system of abstract knowledge. Primary objective is understanding through a receptive, semantic approach, which incorporates rising expectancy level, discrepency feedback levels, and confidence in later speech production. Suggests incorporating…

Presents the major problems plaguing teachers of French literature: (1) the huge split between the methods of teaching language and the methods of teaching literature courses, (2) the gulf between theoretical interests and the reality of the classroom, (3) many students' disinterest in literature. Suggests recentering the teaching of literature…

The miscues of thirty randomly chosen third-year French students in four high schools were examined and analyzed to discover the strategies they used. (Author/RM)

It is asserted that the teacher and learner of a foreign language must learn to direct his attention to the auditory phenomena of the new language. Several auditory exercises in which some of the basic parameters of speech are involved--number, order, duration, pitch, vowel quality--are described. (RM)

An attempt was made to evaluate the effectiveness of a standard one-year advanced English course at Haifa University by administering the same English comprehension test to students before and after the course. Results show that the higher the initial level of the student, the higher his improvement score. (CHK)

Rather than learning just a series of responses to drills, a student can learn "real" French by using L2-L2 (second language) precis work in the language laboratory. The student listens to a previously unheard text and then reproduces it in a shortened form. (CFM)

The Humboldt-Dienst functions as a teaching aid. Some eight times a year it tapes collections of foreign-language information broadcasts, and issues student work sheets and teachers' guides for use therewith. The materials are available at cost; an address for ordering is given. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

This paper discusses the importance of teaching English language learners (ELLs) three reading strategies to help facilitate a productive literacy environment, suggesting that students must be taught specific reading strategies in which purpose, comprehension, and memorization are facilitated. The first section presents a pre-reading strategy,…

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) to investigate the effects of visual information, background knowledge, and academic reading experience, and (2) to identify the non-native readers' problems in comprehending Japanese academic texts. Sixty-three foreign students studying at universities and graduate schools in Japan participated in this…

This paper first gives a brief chronological overview of reading theory development and a short introduction to schema theory, and then comprehensively reviews, comments, and synthesizes research-based studies, published between 1980 and 2002, that examined the effect of text structure (reader effect and text effect) on L1 and L2 reading…

Discusses oral reports as a vehicle for language instruction; individualization'' is a function of subject area and report length. (DD)

Native English speakers' and foreign students' perceptions of 14 English intonation signals, recorded free of verbal context, show foreign students may be misinterpreting or missing much information communicated with nonlexical signals. (Author/MSE)

Defines the approach of textlinguistics to the study of TV messages' comprehension, starting from the basic criterion that comprehension depends on the global semantic structure of the message and on the situational context of the communicants. On this basis the potential of television as a tool for language instruction is discussed. (MES)