This booklet consists of five articles. The first, "Bilingual Education: Reading through Two Languages," by Arturo Luis Gutierrez, stresses the importance of teaching Spanish-speaking children to read first in their native tongue. The second article, "Teaching All Children to Read," by Donald E. Critchlow, discusses methodology and the problems…

This study identified two types of interference between Hungarian and English: phonetic and phonological interference. Four native speakers of Hungarian who are second language speakers of English read a passage containing a wide variety of sounds in different phonological environments. A set of rules mapping American English onto…

The test described here is a particular type of diagnostic test; it is part of a series of tests designed to explore systematically areas of potential lexical difficulty in the English language for French-speaking students of English. The lexical units are considered under their formal, morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. The test has…

Distractors, the incorrect responses to an item on a multiple-choice test, should be designed to create confusion in the minds of some students and to permit a competent student to be able to see that they are wrong. It is possible, by close scrutiny, to isolate the sources of this confusion and, by looking at a statistical analysis, to find out…

This is the fifth volume of work papers on the teaching of English as a second language. The topics are varied and cover a large area of related subjects. The titles in this volume include: "The Interaction of Dialect and Style in Urban American English,""Trends in English Abroad,""Some Thoughts on Bilingual Education for Mexican American Children…

Ausubel distinguishes two kinds of human learning: (1) rote learning, relevant only to a small fraction of human learning, is the mechanistic formation of discrete, isolated traces in cognitive structure, usually through a process of conditioning; (2) meaningful learning, characteristic of most human learning, is a process of "subsuming"…

The relevance to elementary foreign language instruction of certain findings of child language development (native language) and the psychology of language acquisition is examined. A set of premises is proposed for a new scheme for the teaching of German based on these findings, namely, that comprehension precedes production, that language…

The means for ethnic language retention (ELRET) should be built into bilingual education programs in the United States. Currently there are very few programs designed to help a foreign speaker maintain his mother-tongue ability as he learns a new language. Materials designed in this field should take advantage of the concept of "domain…

This final report on the Pontiac Bilingual Program begins with a description of the program and a discussion of the school-community relationship established in the program. Monolingual children, language-interference students, and Anglo children are included in the experiment. The research procedures and tests used in the experiment are…

The discussion presented here seeks to defend Lado's principle of "speech before writing" and focuses attention on the comparative effectiveness of audio versus visual presentation of language material. Reports on several experiments dealing with this problem lead the author to conclude that, as long as we have the tendency of verbalization or…

The present study deals with two language skills, listening and speaking, and it is limited to single consonant phonemes only. The purpose is to try to find answers to the following problems: (1) Which Finnish consonants are given as substitutes for English consonants by Finnish pupils who have no previous (or practically no previous) knowledge of…

An adult immersion program in the Mohawk language took place in an Iroquois community in southern Ontario. The class was limited to 12 students who had taken a readiness course that introduced them to basic grammar and vocabulary. The class met daily in the relaxed setting of a house. The preparation and sharing of meals, the presence of fluent…

Study investigated effectiveness of two techniques in second-language vocabulary development: spacing of first-language (FL) and second-language (SL) words and reversal of the conventional FL/SL order in paired associate learning. Subjects were 16 English-speaking grade-seven students of French. Results showed superior performance in both spacing…

The validity of the theory of crucial similarity in language interference is investigated. The theory proposes that when a first and a second language are structurally similar in some aspects, the second language learner will assume similarity in other aspects, causing interference. In this study, the German of first grade students whose teacher…

Videotape is much like audio tape in that it is magnetic tape on which a signal is electronically recorded, but it carries both an audio and a video signal. Video equipment demands a rather large initial expense but tape is relatively inexpensive. The magnifying, dynamic and synthesizing properties of this medium lend themselves to meeting some…