Types of hierarchies of pronunciation difficulty are discussed, and a hierarchy based on contrastive analysis plus informal observation is proposed. This hierarchy is less one of initial difficulty than of error persistence. One feature of this hierarchy is that, because of lesser learner awareness and very limited functional load, errors…

Three stages of the developing second language of a 3;9-3;11 year-old English-speaking child in an Urdu speech milieu were examined and compared with findings that have been accumulated about the order and process of first language acquisition. The study showed that in the development of many syntactic and morphological features the child used…

This paper proposes a broader and more rigorous approach to the analysis of errors produced by second language learners. As a supplement to longitudinal studies, a procedure called "lateralisation" is advocated as a way of providing the researcher with more data than is normally available through examination of learner text alone. In…

This is a discussion of another phase of bilingualism--structural difficulties in the target language of the student which impede his second language acquisition. The paper focuses on errors in learning English which do not derive from transfers from another language, and which cannot be predicted from contrastive analysis. These are intralingual…

An approach to a contrastive analysis of phonologies for pedagogic purposes is illustrated through the discussion of selected problems of interference which arise in the teaching of Russian pronunciation to native speakers of American English. The need for a recognition of a hierarchy of errors and the importance of the phonetic level of analysis…

Discusses the reasons for the occurrence of spelling errors in the writing of a group of Arab learners of English. (Author/HP)

Investigation of the extent to which young bilingual children's code differentiation correlated with language mixing revealed that children who avoided using their other language when naming pictures of objects which were not known in one of the languages showed significantly less mixing in their speech than children who freely substituted words…

Discusses the design and interpretation of instrumental phonetic studies of second language (L2) speech production. The speech of L2 learners is evaluated to determine to what extent it diverges from the differing phonetic norms of L1, which are estimated from the speech of a small number of native speakers. (Author/LMO)

Describes an investigation into whether second language learners use knowledge of their first language to comprehend and produce idioms in the second language. Results showed identical idioms were the easiest to comprehend, similar idioms were comprehended almost as well, and different idioms were the most difficult to comprehend and produce.…

Discusses second language acquisition, the importance of comprehensible input to this acquisition, and the inadequacy of the theory of language interference as an explanation for errors in second language speech. The role of the teacher in the language classroom and the "procedural syllabus" are described. (SED)

The development of German proficiency by a three-year-old Australian boy living in Germany was monitored for a five-month period. His command of German negation is reported. The study is seen as bearing on issues in first and second language acquisition, such as competence and interference. (JB)

Examines the methodology used in the teaching of foreign languages in the Anglophone Caribbean. Although the methodology most widely used has been the grammar-translation method, there has been a shift to a more communicative methodology based on a notional-functional approach. The language situation here reflects the social and political…

Describes a system, provisionally named Pronto, that uses automatic speech recognition for training pronunciation of second languages in adult learners. Methods are included for developing training in Pronto, and results are presented from evaluating classes of speech recognizers for use in different aspects of pronunciation training. (Author/VWL)

Observes and analyzes Japanese senior high school students' errors due to language transfer. The study focuses on written language, is based on classroom research, and provides possible ways of explaining second-language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

In five picture-word interference experiments, this article explores the gender-congruity effect in Dutch in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. Performance was not affected by the relationship between the gender of the picture and the gender of the word. Results show that the gender-congruity effect is not a universal effect, but varies from…