Examines the role of American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines in language proficiency testing, focusing on Japanese language instruction and discussing how effective that system is in relation to university classroom instruction. Two main issues are addressed: viewing ACTFL Proficiency Tests as having the…

How second language development is assessed has been a question among English as a Second Language (ESL) faculty, since it has previously focused primarily on oral, rather than writing, development. Oral interviews and writing were compared for errors and syntactic maturity to see if any differences could be determined over a two-year period.…

This article reports on the gains that may be obtained from the use of computers to develop language skills in students of English as a foreign language. Advantages and disadvantages of using computers to teach English are presented. A set of guidelines for using computers are suggested, and two related issues in using computers in instruction are…

Investigated how well nonnative speakers (NNSs) could modify their output toward comprehensibility when interacting with native speakers (NSs) and NNSs, noting how often modified comprehensible output (MCO) was other- or self-initiated. Picture-dictation and opinion-exchange task data indicated that most repairs were self-initiated. NNS-NNS…

The results of a within-subject cross-language study of text comprehension in adult second language (L2) learners are presented. Text comprehension and sentence reading time measures were obtained for matched narrative and procedural texts in English and French from adult learners of French as a second language (FSL) at two levels of French…

This paper reports on a third study in a series aimed at investigating the issues surrounding the learning of mathematics at The University of Auckland by students who have English as an Additional Language (EAL students). As well as summarizing the earlier studies, it presents some new data showing that the problems experienced by EAL students…

This paper investigates English language literacy practices among teenagers, focusing initially on three young Singaporean students who are struggling to do well in English. By employing a conceptual framework that builds on a recent treatment of style as identity construction and drawing on interview data that recount the students' practices of…

One common procedure for oral performance testing of Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) learners is one-on-one interviewing wherein the interviewer asks questions and the child candidate responds to them. While existing research has focused primarily on outcomes elicited by such procedures, this study examines the processes…

This article compares previous language gain studies in foreign languages with new data on language gain in the instructed second language acquisition of Russian. The acquisition of listening, reading, speaking, and writing proficiency shows a significant correlation not only with hours of classroom instruction in immersion and nonimmersion…

A key issue in the field of second language acquisition has been the difficulty of specifying accurate measures of implicit language knowledge. This paper describes the development of an elicited imitation test. Its design differs from that of most other elicited imitation tests in that it (a) requires test takers to focus attention first on the…

Previous research on interlanguage pragmatics revealed that, under implicit pragmatic instruction, some learners noticed the target pragmalinguistic features, whereas others receiving the same instruction did not. This suggests possible effects of individual difference (ID) variables on learners' noticing of pragmalinguistic features. Among the ID…

The role of metalinguistic knowledge in learning a foreign/second language is the subject of continuing debate. In this paper we report on a study which explores this issue further with reference to undergraduate students of Chinese as a second/foreign language. The first part of the paper describes the process of developing and validating an…

This article reports on a small-scale study involving adult L1 Swedish learners of L3 German. The main aim of the study was to investigate the effects of group interaction on written German output employing the dictogloss technique. Three short texts were selected for reconstruction, the first and third ones individually, and the second one…

In this article, "Fragebogen" (1992) by Max Frisch is shown to contain appropriately challenging linguistic constructions for use in courses as a supplement to traditional anthologies in conversation/composition courses. Frisch's eleven questionnaires on topics ranging from "Heimat," marriage and private property to humor, money and death serve as…

This study focuses on the source of reading problems of English as a second language learners at the high school level. The results indicate that while reading comprehension is impacted by level of receptive vocabulary knowledge, the ability to select and implement word-appropriate lexical inferencing strategies can compensate for low receptive…