To study the adequacy of the brief oral examination format as a basis for assessing oral skills, the study compared samples of 15-minute oral exams with 3-hour written exam results by the same students. The resultant average size of oral samples was about 77% of that of written samples, with good comparability, leading to useful conclusions about…

"False beginners" are students who are ethnically Chinese but are not native speakers of Chinese, and their mixture in language classes with true beginners is problematic. Merits of an individualized teaching program in elementary Chinese for false beginners offered at Ohio State University is described. (JP)

Compares the degree to which pupils in the French immersion and regular English school programs speak French and initiate contact with French people. Attitudes and motivations were significantly more positive, and social tolerance and self-rated competency in French were much higher in the immersion than in English program subjects. (29…

This article asserts that language assessment practices and policies directed toward recent immigrants should be evaluated on the basis of whether or not they facilitate immigrants' participation in Canadian society. Such an evaluation needs to address institutional barriers, the scope of language assessment, and accommodation to immigrant groups.…

Describes the Australian Language Certificates project, an initiative which provides incentives to students studying second languages by offering external recognition of achievement and enhancing the status of secondary school language learning. It includes listening and reading assessment tasks in six languages. Students receive certificates…

Compared 719 first-, second-, third-grade students enrolled in partial-immersion (PI) programs in Japanese, Spanish, or French to 3 comparison groups. Outcome measures used were a mathematics test, Metropolitan Achievement Test in Reading, and Student Oral Proficiency Rating. PI students scored at least as well as, and to some extent better than,…

A study of adults learning French as a second language showed that enhancing the pedagogical environment through development of a French phonetic training program resulted in improved discrimination and production ability among the students. (39 references) (LB)

Sixty Korean speakers of English who had lived in the United States were tested for their ability to judge the grammaticality of English sentences in 12 grammatical categories in a reaction-time task. Findings suggest that a sensitive period exists in second-language (L2) acquisition as evidenced by faster performance by early-learner L2 groups.…

Reviews interlanguage pragmatics studies with a focus on learning in a liberal sense; in addition to studies with an explicit focus on development, investigations that examine the effect of proficiency as an independent variable on pragmatic performance are also considered. Two lines of inquiry are suggested for further research. (Author/VWL)

A study examined levels of learning strategy use in 149 Hong Kong university students of English-as-a-Second-Language, and the relationship to language proficiency, using the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). The appropriateness of using SILL and proficiency measure in tandem to establish a clear relationship between strategy use…

Investigates the effect teachers trained with American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages oral proficiency interview-type training has on student performance, instructional methods, and classroom materials in the secondary foreign-language classroom. Results of teacher interviews and questionnaires supported the hypothesis that trained…

Discusses why culture should be taught in the foreign language classroom. Focuses on survival and cultural proficiency, background knowledge, the elements of culture that should be taught and how, the goals of teaching culture, conventions and social amenities, connotation, integrating culture in the foreign language curriculum, and techniques and…

Conducted a pilot study with learners of Spanish who had completed a 25-week basic language training at the Defense Language Institute's Foreign Language Center. Compared the listening and reading proficiency of 10 officers with 44 enlisted personnel, using t-tests and analysis of variance (with the Defense Language Proficiency Test as a…

Studied the impact of exposure to authentic video--a Spanish-language telenovela--on the second-language acquisition process of students studying Spanish at the university level. Measured the increase in listening comprehension that exposure to the soap opera would afford and tested the validity of the hypothesis that an increase in the quality…

Examined the effects of phonological memory and native-language (NL) literacy acquisition on learning English as a foreign language. Subjects were Finnish first graders, who were age 7 at the beginning of the study. Results suggest NL literacy is highly significant for foreign-language learning and that one way to promote foreign-language learning…