With increasing pressures being placed on early childhood teachers to provide academic programs, many are turning away from programs that foster pretend play. This study examined two contrasting approaches to teaching preschool children and considered their effects on children's linguistic and social abilities. One of the teaching approaches…

Issues in second language teaching methodology are discussed in light of the concept of proficiency as defined in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Guidelines. It is proposed that rather than think in terms of identifying one optimal methodology for all second language learners, the profession should be…

These four issues of the bibliography, entirely in German, contain 860 citations of journal articles, books, monographs, and reports of research on all aspects of second language teaching and learning. Many of the works cited are in English, French, and Spanish. An introductory section describes the citation format and contains lists of journals,…

The attempt to teach deep structure recovery skills to poor readers was unsuccessful, perhaps because of student attitudes. (JH)

An exercise developed to aid an aphasia patient in relearning rules governing phonological changes in English was later used in a pilot study attempting to teach English pronunciation to French speakers by rule rather than by rote. The method used and the results obtained are reported. (RM)

An argument is made for stressing rhythm and intonation (the prosody of the language) when teaching pronunciation in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) courses. A review of pronunciation teaching revealed that ESL methodology was formed largely from structural linguistics and behavioral psychology. These theories produced at least two concepts…

Studies of age differences in second language learning ability are collected along with commentary on the results. The 12 papers describe long and short term studies of children and adults that focus on the optimal age for second language acquisition, the effect of different teaching methods and environments on age differences, and theories that…

A study of learner modality in second language learning conducted at a small, private liberal arts university had as subjects 20 freshmen in a second-semester Spanish course. The students' modality strength (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or mixed) was correlated with Scholastic Aptitude Test measures, grades, and gender. The findings support…

Students made increased, but statistically non-significant, use of invention procedures taught them over the span of a one-semester composition course. (JH)

A study was conducted to see whether the people of Burundi would learn English more efficiently if it were presented through the people's native language, Kirundi, rather than through French. Five components were determined for the experiment: lexicon, structure, conversation, pronunciation, and spelling. A survey of 23 advanced students in a…

Controlling the rate of oral delivery in the second language classroom has been demonstrated as beneficial to the learner, whose information-processing capacity is an important factor in listening comprehension. Rate of information delivery can be controlled by limiting the actual rate of words per unit of time, or by maintaining content…

This study considers whether the outcomes for students who participated in an individualized instructional approach to language learning in intermediate college-level foreign language courses are different from the outcomes for students who participated in a lecture-recitation aproach. A two-treatment group quasi-experimental design was used. The…

The order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by native-speaking children of Spanish, Cantonese, Tagalog, and Ilokano learning English as a second language between the ages of five and ten was investigated in a study involving 442 students. The acquisition patterns of these children were compared with those of monolingual…

The pedagogical usefulness of contrastive analysis (CA) is examined and suggestions are offered on ways to use it in foreign language instruction, with particular reference to instruction in English as a Second Language in India. Some of the literature that maintains that CA is almost useless to language teachers is reviewed and answered. The…

This survey of research on bilingualism focuses on a controversy over methods for teaching reading, namely, should non-readers achieve literacy in their native language before learning to read a second language? As a report of the results of various studies shows, both proponents of prior native language literacy and proponents of prior second…