Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.),…

This report discusses the teaching of French intonation through computerized instruction. In particular, the development of a computer program for teaching French intonation is described and explained. The first part of the report examines the role of oral language instruction in French, including a history and overview of methodologies. The…

A study of distance teaching of modern languages in institutions around the world is reported. An introductory section provides an overview of the status and role of distance education in modern language learning, including an examination of related linguistic and educational theory, the objectives of distance language instruction, the behaviorist…

Papers in this volume include: "The Role of Tone in Some Cushitic Languages" (David L. Appleyard); "Downdrift in a Tone Language with Four Tone Levels" (G. N. Clements); "Non-Pitch Exponents of Accent and Structure in Japanese" (John Coleman); "Clause Structure and Tone in Sandawe" (Edward D. Elderkin);…

Question development in English as a second language in four native Spanish-speaking children is described. The English questions initiated by four children differing in English proficiency (two limited English speaking and two fluent English speaking) were examined at two points in time to determine how question use changes in the syntactic,…

In an analysis of stress and intonation, stress is shown to distinguish semantic and grammatical meaning on every level of language. It is suggested that the distinction between stress and intonation is particularly important in teaching English as a second language. Written texts and fabricated examples of dialogue are used, with a focus on…

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…

"Beginning Indonesian" is a five-volume series designed to provide language instruction for a three-semester intensive college course or a six-semester non-intensive course. The format throughout the series consists of lesson units containing sections of basic sentences presented in dialog form, reading selections, and grammar, each followed by…

The chief purposes of this book are the illustration of an analytical approach to tone languages, a methodology based upon recent linguistic advance, and the presentation of firsthand data on Mixteco and Mazateco, languages which represent two very different structural arrangements of linguistic tone. Part 1 describes some of the types of…

This study explores the effect of information focus on the size of the unit decoded by a reader. Sixty students chosen at random from average reading groups in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade levels were studied. Each subject read orally 36 thematic sentence frames presented in random order. Each frame contained a point at which the visual display…

This text, an intensive course in oral American English, is intended especially for those foreign students attending American universities who may read well and have a good grasp of grammar but still need more oral practice. Each of the 20 lessons, designed for the classroom, contains a short dialog centered around everyday situations which…

The author finds Katz and Postal's 1964 generative semantic theories concerning the organization of grammar incorrect and proposes an interpretive approach to semantics in which syntactic structures are given interpretations by an autonomous semantic component. The research reported leads the author to describe a generative grammar consisting of…

This study, the fifth in the series "Studies in the Phonology of Asian Languages," aims to describe those acoustic features involved in the distinction of Korean stop consonants, using the sound spectrograph and pitch extractor as research tools. The report specifically deals with voice onset time associated with weak and strong stops and the…

This document contains three reports in prepublication form on research conducted by linguists at the University of Colorado. The first paper presents an argument against the theories concerning the concept of the distributional syllable. Such theories are based on the assumptions that the syllable can and should be defined formally, without…

The work of Harold E. Palmer, the individual responsible for consolidating the ideas of the nineteenth-century reform movement into what became known as the Direct Method of second language teaching, is examined. The ideas began with Palmer's conviction that language should be taught by an aural-oral methodology, and he developed teaching…