Discusses the role of illustrations used to clarify the meaning of dialogues in instruction in French as a second language. (Text is in French.) (AM)

This supplement to the Peace Corps Course in Tunisian Arabic is intended primarily for Peace Corps volunteers, but is also useful to other English speakers who wish to acquire systematically a knowledge of Tunisian Arabic. The dictionary consists of two parts. The lexicon, which begins with a chart of all the phonetic symbols used in the…

Some theoretical definitions of attitudes, including various assumptions that underlie most approaches to attitude mesurement, are presented, and directions and findings of attitude research approaches to attitude measurement are the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, the semantic differential, and the Likert scale, each characterized by a particular…

Two dimensions of the definition of idiom (the semantic and the structural) that may be relevant to the foreign language learner language learner are abstracted from non-specialist dictionary definitions of the term "idiom." The structural dimension is further subdivided into two aspects: place in a structural hierarchy, and degree of…

Two English-speaking six-year-olds attending a French-speaking kindergarten in Montreal were tested for the content of their French L2 (second language) utterances. An adaptation of the mean length of utterance (MLU) index was used to judge the order of acquisition in the encoding of semantic-syntactic relations in the second language. The same…

Language teaching requires textbook material that contains the most frequent concepts of a language. The computer brings its tremendous information processing ability to the task of establishing word frequency rankings, but the computer is limited to counting word-forms and not semantic concepts. The most recent word frequency dictionaries, in…

The recognition of the systematic nature of the interference of the mother tongue when learning a second language is among the most significant advances in linguistics for the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The work of Weinreich showed that interference between language systems--the absorption of loan words, calques, and phonological,…

By dealing with the semantic area of English and Spanish clothing terms, the article shows some of the ways that vocabulary out of context in contrastive systems (viewed as a prerequisite to vocabulary in context) can be used. (SCC)

Defends the valence theory as being useful in the constrastive aspect of foreign language teaching. Numerous examples are given illustrating how the semantic characteristics of the subject limit the possible choices of verbs that can occur with it. (IFS/WGA)

Students of French are now more fluent orally than their counterparts of a few years ago. They are using, however, a more anglicized French. The causes are three: (1) unawareness of the value of words; (2) infrequent use of reference material, specifically the dictionary; (3) lack of adequate knowledge of basic rules. (CFM)

This article discusses ways in which vocabulary building can be simplified for the student of Russian. Computer analysis of text vocabulary can assist in selecting words to be learned and assessing the relative difficulty of texts for both students and teachers. (CHK)

Study of the probabilistic nature of processing strategies in Dutch/English bilinguals indicated that sentence interpretation in English generally paralleled that in Dutch, with divergence toward similarity in performance by English monolinguals. (Author/CB)

Discusses results of comparison of immersion and minority language programs. By promoting use of the mother tongue inside and outside of school, providing literacy experiences for children who may not have had them, and using culturally relevant teaching approaches and materials, schools can make education a worthwhile experience for members of…

This article criticizes the systematic use of audio-visual methods in second language teaching because of the imprecise semantic impression they may leave on the student. The use of translation exercises is proposed as an alternative. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Research supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. (DD)