The results of a newly developed Haitian-Creole oral proficiency test are presented. The test is administered in Haitian-Creole to Creole-speaking and limited-speaking Haitian-origin children at two educational levels: grades kindergarten through 3 and grades 4-6. The test is designed to assess the child's language proficiency in three linguistic…

The purpose of this document is to spell out clear objectives in reading, writing, listening, and speaking for all students in Boston, Massachusetts, elementary and middle schools. The objectives include all of the Massachusetts Basic Skills; these are directly linked to competency tests and teacher observation at each level to measure students'…

The long-range objectives of ESL in bilingual/bicultural programs include: 1) writing acceptable prose; 2) reading English acceptably; 3) competence in grammatical analysis; 4) competence in verbal persuasion; 5) competence in skills of a coordinate bilingual; 6) functional comprehension of both cultures and 7) use of language variety. (CHK)

Instructional models for foreign language reading and listening comprehension are outlined and synthesized, and an instructional procedure based on immediate recall, a standardized method for assessing first-language comprehension, is proposed. First, the interrelated processes of reading and listening comprehension, as currently defined in the…

This newsletter discusses a Swedish research project investigating the command immigrant school children living in Sweden have of their native language and of Swedish as a second language. The project's objective is to describe the children's language proficiency and factors promoting or inhibiting it in the classroom. The study is undertaken in…

In the Lower Kuskokwim School District of western Alaska, the Yupik Eskimo language is the language of preference in most homes and communities, and students are relatively isolated from an environment that requires the consistent use of fluent English. The district's bilingual education staff attempted to locate a commercially developed…

The oral proficiency interview should be administered infrequently, but there are other measures than can be used between interviews to maintain oral proficiency and achievement as the organizing principles of instruction while placing fewer demands on the teacher/tester. One such measure is a semi-direct procedure that has two steps. First,…

This report reflects the efforts of the federally mandated National Advisory and Coordinating Council on Bilingual Education (NACCBE) to search for ways by which local school systems can exercise greater choice of teaching methodologies while still meeting their responsibilities of teaching English to all of their non-English speaking students. It…

The question of dividing language proficiency into components was explored by determining which of three models best fit the experimental data: a model postulating numerous specific sources of variance (the extreme divisible model), one postulating a single, large source of variance (the unitary model), or one postulating a large general factor…

A study of the reliability of the proficiency ratings scale and techniques used by three federal government agencies--the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Language Institute, and the Foreign Service Institute (FSI)--to test employees' oral language proficiency in French and German had two randomly selected two-person teams of testers from…

A study was made to ascertain the achievement of Hmong refugee children attending elementary school in the Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) and to examine relationships of classroom factors and school resource program characteristics to Hmong student achievement. A total of 237 students from 136 first through sixth grade classrooms…

A study of language patterning as an indicator of higher cortical process focused on three matched comparison groups: normal pre-middle-aged, normal elderly, and elderly adults with senile dementia Alzheimer's type. In addition to tests of memory, level of cognitive function, and organic deficit, the formal aspects of language were analyzed in…

A study was undertaken in an effort to develop techniques for monolingual speech pathologists in the Boston public schools to assess whether language behavior of Cape Verdean immigrants is due to language learning disabilities or simply to language differences. The following three questions were addressed: (1) What are some of the differences…

A study compared normative communication apprehension (CA) data on Mexican American high school and college students with CA data from other Hispanics speaking English in order to determine the extent to which the subjects' self-perceived competence in a language was related to CA in that language. Subjects were 388 Mexican American and 41 Anglo…

Proficiency, which refers to a concept that is more complex than is generally acknowledged, is an overworked term in second language teaching that lacks a satisfactory operational definition. Linguistic knowledge is currently defined most often in terms of what an individual is able to do with the knowledge, as in the movement for competency-based…