This study was conducted to determine the extent of the Navy's problem with recruits who speak English as a second language (ESL). One hundred two Hispanic recruits were tested and interviewed to assess their proficiency in English and problems that low proficiency might be causing in recruit training. Two groups that work with Spanish-speaking…

This monograph describes the development of a language program for four-year-old disadvantaged boys in Northern Ireland. Various sections of the work describe the steps in devising the program; its objectives, organization, evaluations, and subsequent modifications; the problems affecting implementation, and the efforts made to overcome them; the…

Sixteen children (aged 14 to 26 months), who were reported by their parents to overextend, were tested for overextension in both language production and comprehension. The children were first asked to name each of a series of pictures of inappropriate exemplars of the words they were reported to overextend. Those words that were overextended, a…

An investigation of: (1) the relationship between the American College Test (ACT) English Usage Test scores and demonstrated writing proficiency, and (2) the relationships between and among other objective tests and writing proficiency was undertaken, using three samples of college freshmen. Although results indicated a moderately high…

Factors responsible for the inadequate preparation for college Russian courses of many high school trained students of Russian are identified, and remedies are suggested. Attention is given to common deficiencies in high school training, minimum requirements for advanced placement, placement tests, the need to establish a standard program, and…

This battery of test instruments is one of a set of three developed for use in the study of bilingual (English-Spanish) instruction and other compensatory education programs in Texas. These tests are designed to measure children's basic competence in a language via their perception of linguistic phenomena. The Level II battery is…

This text contains 66 lessons in Fante for the student of Fante as a second language. The principal emphasis of the lessons is in developing skills in the spoken language, and study is preferable with a native speaker of Fante. The use of English is to be avoided except when absolutely necessary. Because of the attention given to oral skills, the…

Three papers from this issue of the Working Papers are provided here. "The Nesting Constraint in Child Language," by Patrick Alan Brogan, discusses a child's ability to perform complex, internally embedded sentences. It is hypothesized that difficulty stems from a child's limited short-term memory. "A Framework for Studying Kin Term…

This report evaluated the reading and language program in one elementary school which was intended to improve word knowledge, word analysis, and reading comprehension skills for 300 students in grades K through 5. Students who participated in the program were below grade level in reading and language skills. Educational Assistants were assigned to…

This study presents a new version of the cloze procedure used as a placement test for foreign students enrolled in an English language program for non-native speakers. Called the New Cloze Test (NCT), the test was administered to 136 foreign students who were beginning college students and who had not been in the United States longer than one…

There is a lack of adequate measurement techniques for testing language proficiency. Researchers compose specific tests for a certain task, but these have only limited general applicability. Often multiple-choice, true-false or fill-in-the-blank tests are used, but these rely heavily on written language and are inadequate for those with poor…

Some validity criteria were applied to the language proficiency measures used by the British Council, particularly the "Davies Test." Five types of test validity are identified: construct validity; content validity; concurrent validity compared with another test; prediction validity; and face, or apparent, validity. Foreign students…

The Commander Naval Amphibious School is responsible for the Vietnamese language training of certain naval officer and enlisted personnel who are enroute to assignments in Vietnam. Courses of two and six weeks are offered; they were designed to meet the language needs of river boat crewmen and advisors. The Navy Training Research Laboratory was…

Biographical and bibliographical information gathered during 1964-65 by the Hispanic Foundation is provided on 1,884 United States residents who are Latin American specialists. These specialists in the social sciences and the humanities were selected from two categories: (1) "area" specialists; and (2) "non-area" specialists,…

The hypothesis that monolingual and bilingual German-Canadian speakers differ in their attitudes toward German language and culture and in their achievement in the study of German was tested. The results were compared to those obtained by Gardner and Lambert in their French-American studies, in which it was found that home language background is…