Despite a growing trend and early successes, program development for business language courses is still in its early stages. Curriculum developers have much work to do, many decisions to make, and a variety of problems to solve, most important of which are content, approaches, learning systems, and instructional strategies. First, the program type…

A Toronto (Canada) study explored how low levels of schooling and literacy affected access of Latin-American adults to aspects of everyday life. Subjects were nine Spanish-speaking men and women, most with little or no formal schooling and varying levels of Spanish literacy. Analysis of data gathered in interviews revealed that the individuals…

One way to make it possible for students to write intelligible composition in a foreign language is to provide them with a knowledge and understanding of the bilingual dictionary at the beginning of the composition course. A unit on dictionary usage is presented that was designed for use with students in a third-year college Spanish composition…

A study of the linguistic interference of nine multilingual immigrants to the Saguenay Peninsula of Quebec province examined three types of interference in their spoken English. They included: (1) interlingual interference from the mother tongue; (2) intralingual intrusion from structures and lexical items from within English in situations and…

English pronunciation lessons and exercises for Spanish speakers are presented. The lessons are designed with the phonological characteristics of both the native and target languages in mind. The lessons cover consonants and consonant clusters, vowels and diphthongs, stress and pitch, and rapid speech phonology. A chart is provided which…

A teacher's guide and student and teacher workbooks for the first level of a multi-level instructional program for teaching Spanish as a second language to children whose native language is English are presented. Each level of the complete program contains a teacher's manual, a teacher's workbook and vocabulary picture book, a student's workbook,…

This study analyzes how two bilingual classroom language distribution approaches affect classroom language use patterns. The two strategies, separate instruction in the two languages vs. the new concurrent language usage approach (NCA) allowing use of both languages with strict guidelines for language alternation, are observed on videotapes of a…

Background information is provided on the four sites where the Spanish-English component of a longitudinal study of language development was conducted. The study was designed to examine the dynamic process of language acquisition over time in bilingual children. Each of the four schools selected was in a different geographical and sociocultural…

The Illinois Bilingual Education Service Center is State funded and includes several component projects: Illinois Resource Center; Title VII Midwest Resource Center; Illinois ELS/ABE (English as a Second Language/Adult Basic Education) Service Center; and the Bilingual Consumer and Homemaking Education Project. Project cooperation and content are…

A plea for a revision of methods used in graduate language programs, particularly Spanish, this article opposes admitting students to graduate programs for the purpose of obtaining teachers or filling up upper-level classes. Highly structured programs should be substituted with individualized, flexible ones. Testing should be revised. (SC)

A language instruction program in Spanish and Haitian French helps the English-speaking staff of a New York hospital provide medical care to the largely Puerto Rican and Haitian community it serves. (Author)

As the fortunate participants in the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute entitled La Realidad Mágica de Oaxaca, the authors designed interactive ways to share their rich and colorful learning experiences with their students and colleagues. This article discusses how the authors presented their Oaxacan adventures in an all-day…

This article describes a project on chickens and eggs undertaken by 5-year-old children in a bilingual school in Mexico City. It describes the three phases of the project and includes photographs and other documentation of the children's work.