Analysis of errors collected from English essays of native Arabic-speaking university students and their translations from Arabic into English identified 14 error classifications, with the vast majority of errors attributable to negative transfer or interference from Arabic. (CB)

Considers the implications of Yoruba as the Nigerian mother tongue for linguistic competence in French at the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and sociosemantic levels. (CB)

Investigates the relationship between auditory and visual processing modality and strategy instruction in first- and second-grade children. Determines sentence strategy to be effective for both auditory and visual processing. (HOD)

Background: Politeness strategies vary from language to language and within each society. At times the wrong strategies can have disastrous effects. This can occur when languages are used by non-native speakers or when they are used outside of their own home linguistic context. Purpose: This study of spoken language compares the politeness…

Relates the English language spelling system to sound and examines whether spellers make use of the information available in that relationship when spelling words. Describes how certain phonological features of a dialect spoken along the northeast coast of Newfoundland influence spelling errors among fourth graders. (SB)

Presents evidence of a study of speakers of English as a Second Language that cross-language transfer effects interact with developmental effects in the construction of second language (L2) syllable structures. Argues that the optimality theory provides a more explicit account than the minimal sonority distance parameter setting model regarding…

Describes a study of English writing by Norwegian English-as-a-foreign-language learners. Language problems on different linguistic levels are analyzed and the theory of compensatory strategies is used to explain the process behind the production. Results show that less proficient learners have a higher number of grammatical, orthographic, and…

This study investigates whether the age at which English becomes dominant for Western Armenian bilinguals in the United States affects their vowel production in Western Armenian. Participating in the study were ten Western-Armenian bilinguals who learned English before age 8, ten bilinguals who did not learn English until adulthood, and one…

A study of the process of bilingualization of second-generation immigrants to Catalonia, a region of Spain, is described and summarized. The study looks at the interrelationships between (1) linguistic context, all sources of messages in natural speech; (2) linguistic behavior, the real communicative use the individual makes of his expressive…

A study of the effects of learning Swedish as a third language on the previously-learned English of native Finnish-speaking students examined 10,000 English-language school-leaving examinations of Finnish students for possible examples of Swedish influence in vocabulary, grammar, and word order. The examinations were those graded by a native…

A study investigated the process of learning French by Chinese students, as revealed by student errors in 48 compositions and 33 oral reports. Grammatical, or competency, errors were categorized by type and frequency. Analysis of the results shows the most frequent errors to be, in declining order of occurrence: in the use of articles; choice of…

As part of a larger study of the oral reading of elementary school students representing eight linguistic populations in the United States, a study was conducted to discover why readers make the same miscues at the same point in a text and to discover factors in the text that contribute to this phenomenon. Subjects were second, fourth, and sixth…

Areas of interference between English and the Spanish of some Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Chicago is the subject of this study. Fifty-nine informants were provided with a list of everyday expressions in English, which they were to express in Spanish. The informants were classified according to education, degree of knowledge of English, and degree…

An historical overview of research on second language acquisition considers research topics examined in observational/longitudinal studies and experimental studies. The questions that have reappeared across both observational and experimental studies concern: (1) whether second language learning is the same or different from first language…

Interviews with 108 Navajo children from bilingual first grade classes on Navajo reservations were recorded. Analysis of the interviews focused on phonological, grammatical, and lexical features that show a systematic variation within the speech of individuals or between individuals. Variable features were compared with background factors such as…