The linguistic theory of contrastive analysis, which provides pragmatic insights into the teaching of foreign languages, can be equally successful when applied to the teaching of one dialect of a language to speakers of its other dialects. This paper briefly illustrates how a theoretically constructed hierarchy of difficulty, originally designed…

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 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 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 sequence in which sounds, structures, and vocabulary are presented is important in teaching a second language efficiently. The guidelines given here for the teaching English pronunciation and grammar in the kindergarten are based on that premise. The guidelines are given in four sections: (1) general, for all direct language instruction; (2)…

This paper discusses several aspects of the need for research in communication education for black children. Initial comments underline the need for educating teachers in communication behavior and teaching methods. The complex nature of the problem under review indicates the need for careful delineation of the problem for effective research and…

This collection of 52 papers in the field of applied linguistics presents ideas of diversified topics. General and specific topics in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and language instruction are covered. Testing, teaching methods, speech problems, and the use of computers, language laboratories, radio, and television are…

Reviews common pronunciation problems experienced by learners of English as a second language who are native speakers of Vietnamese, Cantonese, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Greek, and Punjabi. (CB)

Analysis of reading comprehension errors made by 22 Spanish-speaking fourth-graders in decoding English text found that comprehension "errors" began at the word level and advanced to larger misinterpretations at the sentence level. The cognitive processes of English language learners when comprehending English texts showed individual differences,…

This paper, intended for freshman English instructors who teach reading and writing to both native and non-native students, discusses basic differences and similarities affecting instruction for the two groups. For example, non-native linguistic differences encourage teachers to deal with syntactic interference in reading and with highly embedded…

The article criticizes present-day overemphasis of contrastive analysis procedures in second language instruction. Recommendations are for language teachers to reappraise their classroom objectives and to give paramount importance to mastery of language use rather than mastery of language structure. Pedagogical procedures based on situational…

Some basic problems of current lower-division foreign language instruction are discussed from the standpoint of real-life language use, and specific measures for meeting some of the problems are suggested for learning German as a second language. Some of the significant discrepancies between the use of a language in real life and in the language…

This paper presents a discussion of the theory of bilingual education, including ideas developed by several linguistic researchers. Various aspects of bilingual education are discussed including objectives, definition, raison d'etre, dominance and balance, learning, types, and barriers. Second language learning is considered along with reasons for…