BECAUSE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION FOR A CHILD IS AN UNCONSCIOUS PROCESS, FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION IN THE ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM SHOULD AVOID "CONSCIOUS" LEARNING PROCEDURES AND STRIVE FOR A NATURAL SITUATION. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION FOR AN ADULT IS AN ARTIFICIAL, CONSCIOUS PROCESS, HOWEVER, AND NECESSITATES DIFFERENT TEACHING METHODS AND…

Experiments in language teaching have indicated that, especially in the case of teaching English as a foreign language, no pronunciation of English sounds natural unless the intonation (prosodic features) is fairly acceptable. Even with satisfactory consonants and vowels, a phrase with incorrect melody still sounds foreign. On the other hand, when…

This paper examines the belief that the best way of teaching English-as-a-second language (TESL) is to provide the student with opportunities for hearing and speaking "Standard" English. The author contests C.C. Fries' view that "...speech 'is' the language." In India, it is noted, the greatest single difficulty for students is…

Writing is often considered the most difficult and time-consuming skill to teach. There is a strong prejudice against writing lessons among Turkish students and teachers, both at high school and university levels. This paper describes the problems that students and teachers have in undergraduate writing classes and suggests journal writing as an…

Since 1971 the approach adopted in the teaching of English phonetics in Denmark has been a contrastive one. In this paper it is argued that although the original contrastive hypothesis (Lado 1957) has to be modified and weakened, a contrastive approach is highly useful in learning and teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language. Selected…

Foreign students in American colleges and universities experience difficulty with various aspects of English composition, especially grammar, mechanics, syntax, sentence and paragraph structure, and report writing. One way to deal with the situation is to set up a composition course in ESL in which the specific problems of non-native speakers are…

For years language teachers have conducted error analysis for remedial purposes. More recently error analysis has assumed a developmental purpose, namely as a clue to the process of acquiring a second language. Causes of learner errors, such as interference from the first language, confusing aspects of the second language, or learners fostering…

The problem of interference caused by linguistic transfer in second language learning does not increase with the number of languages that the student has acquired. The ability to learn a second, third, or fourth language depends on what Chomsky calls "the language acquisition device," which is a capacity or a sensitivity formed by a combination of…

The paper addresses a key issue in language planning of the third world countries, specifically Pakistan, a country that remained under the shackles of Colonialism till 1947. But, still the country does not have a clear cut language policy. Being richly multilingual and multicultural, it had to cope with the problem of a second language, the…

Three essays are presented that deal with phonetic correction and that are intended specifically for Anglophones. They deal with the following topics: (1) methods and processes useful in phonetic correction with students called "false intermediates"; (2) a synthesis and a methodology of methods of phonetic correction of the "French R" with…

The purpose of this guide is to: (1) point out those differences between Black Tai and English which will cause difficulties for the Black Tai-speaking students of English, and (2) outline the most effective ways of helping the student overcome these difficulties. The first section is a contrastive analysis of the phonologies of Black Tai and…

Error analysis concerns the investigation of negative influences on the foreign language learning process. Errors are usually thought of as caused by interference from the native language to the target language. In this article it is shown that interference occurs in the other direction as well, i.e. from language 2 to language 1. Jakobovits has…

Error analysis is considered both a part of the methodology for the psycholinguistic investigation of the second language acquisition process as well as a part of the teaching-learning methods and materials re-evaluation process. The language acquisition process is a dynamic process governed by the principles of hypothesis formulation, testing and…

This paper first explains the diversity of the Arab World, the unifying force of Classical Arabic, and that Modern Standard Arabic, less complicated in structure and less ornate in rhetoric, is sufficiently Different from colloquial dialects to require considerable instruction in schools. For contrastive analysis to be useful as a basis for EFL…

Investigates the writing processes of nonstandard dialect, basic writers through the case study of an eleventh grade minority student. Offers teaching methods which utilize the strengths and address the underlying problems of nonstandard dialect students. (MM)