An experiment measuring the effectiveness of two procedures for presenting pattern drills was devised in order to show that pattern drills are most useful as a learning device if deliberately related to situational or meaningful content. Criteria for the selection of subjects are presented here, as are sample test items and a table of results.…

An investigation which attempted to determine the relative effectiveness of monolingual and bilingual glossaries in teaching foreign language vocabulary to adults is described. Eight matched groups of students (four each in two separate experiments) were taught new English words according to two different principles. In half the groups, the…

The experiments outlined in this paper assess the relative effectiveness of two approaches to teaching foreign language grammar to adults. One approach, called the "Implicit Method," is based on the audiolingual habit theory of language learning. Grammar is taught inductively through the reading of dialogues and practice with carefully…

This newsletter provides a summary of the documentation available on the activities connected with the Unterrichtsmethode English (UME) Project, an investigation of methods for teaching English as a second language, conducted from 1965 to 1970. The documents listed and described cover general reports; details of the material-method system;…

The reading laboratory has been developed to supplement intensive reading work for adult foreign students developing English-as-a-second-language skills at the American Language Institute. The laboratory is designed to suggest to students that there is a variety of reading tasks and a variety of reading strategies related to the tasks, to offer…

This is a preliminary report on a series of small-scale language teaching experiments, aimed primarily at demonstrating that valid research into language teaching methods is possible. Small-scale refers not to the number of subjects involved, but to the scope of the experiment. Instead of looking at a method as a whole (as happens in large-scale…

Beginning with a brief review of the growth of the audiolingual method of foreign language instruction in the United States of America, this paper examines implications and lessons drawn from an educational experiment in language instruction known as the Pennsylvania Report. The text of a memorandum to school administrators in Pennsylvania by the…

This text describes a Swedish research program (GUME Project--the Swedish equivalent of the Gothenburg/Teaching/Methods/English Project) carried out during 1968-71 within the field of second-language instruction and learning. A number of comparative experiments were performed in order to assess the relative merits of two different approaches to…

Reports on an experiment that sought to determine the change in attitudes of secondary school students toward Mexico and Mexicans following a five-week experience in Mexico. Attitudes were tested on a semantic differential. (AM)

In response to Resolution (68) 18 adopted by the Ministers' Deputies on 28 June 1968, the ANFE (tr. National Association of Emigrants' Families) conducted an experiment in teaching languages to Italian workers and their families wishing to emigrate to another European country. Two courses were organised in the district of Latina at Sperlonga and…

This report describes the background, aim and design of the EPAL (English in the elementary school) project in Sweden. As background to the project, a survey is included of the increasingly important position of teaching English from the 1940's through the great school reforms of the 50's and 60's. Developments in foreign language teaching in the…

The Council of Europe is based on the principle that each member state is responsible for its use of foreign labour and for determining the number and nature of such workers to meet the needs of its own economy. Therefore, the Council has never assumed the task of organising the free movement of manpower nor of encouraging movements of workers in…

This article describes an experiment in early Welsh-English bilingual education which was begun in September of 1968 with 35 children and which continued for two years. There was one male teacher who used mostly Welsh and taught for one hour per day. The average age of the children at the beginning of the two-year experiment was five years, two…

In order to gain some insight into the issue of optimum age for second language learning, the experiment described in this report was based on the negative hypothesis that there is no significant difference in the ability of randomly selected subjects, kindergarten through grade six, to imitate critical sounds and sound clusters embedded in words…

This experiment continues the GUME experiments investigating methods for teaching English to Swedish school pupils. The aims of this particular study are twofold: (1) to analyze and classify the errors made by Swedish pupils in an oral English test in an effort to establish error patterns; and (2) to describe how the twelve most frequent errors in…