A set of functional-analytic materials, entailing the study and practice of sociostylistic variation, was implemented in three eighth-grade French immersion (FI) classrooms by their respective teachers during French language arts classes over a five-week period. Pre- and posttests indicate that functional-analytic teaching improved FI students'…

Analysis of the use of a cloze-procedure test to measure the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) proficiency of Japanese college students revealed that the cloze test correlated significantly with an essay test and improved prediction of ESL proficiency, suggesting that carefully constructed cloze tests could be useful in integrative language…

Discusses the linguistic and psychological barriers that exist for English-speaking students of Arabic. The article explains theoretical and practical issues in teaching Arabic as a foreign language and describes the implementation of four principles in the Foreign Service Institute approach. Suggests that this approach is transferrable to…

Investigates the effect of oral and electronic media on interaction patterns by learners of Japanese as a second language. The framework for the analysis of learner is speech act theory, which provides a richly developed set of descriptive categories by which to examine interactional processes. (Author/JL)

When Botswana gained independence from the British in 1966, a political decision was taken to designate English as an official language and Setswana, one of the indigenous languages, as a national language. This move disregarded the multilingual nature of Botswana society. Furthermore, although not explicitly stated, the use of other languages…

This study systematically examines the strength of the connection between synchronous CMC and pragmatic instruction by measuring the effects of three types of synchronous group discussion (written chat [WC], oral chat [OC], and traditional face-to-face [FF] discussion) on the acquisition of the speech act (refusals of an invitation) in the target…

A bilingual model has been applied to educating deaf students who are learning American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language and written English as a second. Although Cummins's (1984) theory of second language learning articulates how learners draw on one language to acquire another, implementing teaching practices based on this theory,…

This issue contains five articles, including reports of activities of the University of Hong Kong's English Center, five action research reports, reflections on various conferences, and a book review by Ray Mackay of "Asian Voices in English." The five articles are: "Cultural Syntonicity: Co-operative Relationships between the ESP Unit and Other…

This textbook is designed to teach modern literary Tibetan and to serve as a grammar and handbook of standard Tibetan. The development of modern written Tibetan has been so influenced by printed materials from many surrounding countries that it is vastly different from classical Tibetan. Borrowings of vocabulary, style, and grammar have created a…

A review of the difficulties Spanish-Americans and Mexican-Americans encounter in learning English, caused by a lack of knowledge of common idioms and figures of speech in current usage, leads to a discussion of two pilot studies in which the frequency of occurrence of idiomatic and figurative constructions in the reading materials presented to…

This vocabulary list is directed towards the Tamil instructor and the advanced student. Its primary goal is to bring some order to the teaching of vocabulary in the first two years of Tamil instruction. A secondary goal is to help the student through the vocabulary maze of Tamil diglossia. Three main criteria were employed in selecting words for…

The present study reports on exploratory research to determine whether the Aluminum Paragraph, a sentence-combining exercise developed by O'Donnell (Hunt, 1970) to measure the development of syntactic complexity in the writing of native speakers of English, can also serve as a measure of the active syntactic proficiency of learners of English as a…

This article examines instances of "para-poetic" writing produced by beginning and intermediate learners of English as a Second Language. It is suggested that the instructor or reader look beyond the conventional grammar and usage rules to appreciate the imagery of unusual juxtaposition of words and phrases in student work. Provides examples of…

Provides background information on Japanese writing system and how most Japanese learn to read Japanese at school, discusses history and practice of typical English-language education in Japan, presents review of recent research on word recognition and the effects of first-language reading on English-as-a-Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL), and…

This article focuses on the incidence of lexical transfer as a communication/learning strategy in the written English of 32 beginning Hispanic, disadvantaged students learning English as a Second Language at Bayamon University Technical College in Puerto Rico. Subjects were asked to write a detailed description in English of a simple ink drawing…