One approach to teaching business letter writing skills in German to second-year students with limited German language skills is described. The letter-writing material was integrated into a business German course sequence. Students were introduced to the general purpose of business correspondence and to several different letter types. The first…

This study is intended to provide for the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Colleges and Universities information, conclusions, and recommendations which bear on key questions, issues, and directions relevant to teacher supply and demand in Ontario from the present to the turn of the century and beyond. Analysis is also provided of school…

A study examined the relationship between French teachers' use of behavior alteration techniques in the classroom, and the perceptions of individuals evaluating the teacher (students, peers, administrators) on the quality of instructional performance. Junior and community college French students, language teachers, and administrators responded to…

A text concordancer is a computer program that operates on a body of text to locate and sort all occurrences of a target morpheme, word, or pattern. Developments in word processing and hard disks in small computers have made new applications of the technique possible with direct relevance to the classroom. A discussion of the technique looks at…

A discussion of the state of writing instruction in English as a foreign language (EFL) in China begins with a review of the history of instruction, and then looks at the current situation in Chinese schools. The focus in on political influences on the evolution of EFL composition instruction and on problems in the acceptance of contemporary…

The New York City schools' syllabus for the first year of high school French instruction outlines a communicative curriculum conforming to state standards of preparation for state language proficiency examinations. The syllabus begins with an introductory section that describes the objectives and approach used and provides suggestions for…

The New York City schools' syllabus for the first year of high school Spanish instruction outlines a communicative curriculum conforming to state standards of preparation for state language proficiency examinations. The syllabus begins with an introductory section that describes the objectives and approach used and provides suggestions for…

The New York City schools' syllabus for the first three years of high school Italian instruction outlines a communicative curriculum conforming to state standards of preparation for state language proficiency examinations. The syllabus begins with an introductory section that describes the objectives and approach used and provides suggestions for…

Educators rarely attempt to exploit the positive features of their students' family and ethnic backgrounds as helpful resources for instruction. Rather, they seek out students' individual differences only when problems arise. Thinking positively about the influences of particular features becomes lost in problem-centered efforts to maintain test…

Past and current education and language policy in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), which was formerly the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific, is discussed. Although under U.S. Navy administrative control since 1947, FSM is currently being divided into independent nations. The area has been influenced by colonization by Germany and Spain…

A discussion of the field of applied linguistics defines the scope of the discipline, outlines some of the regular publications and activities within it, and looks at four examples of its role in the field of education: language planning, refugee and immigrant issues, dialect issues, and varieties of English. It is emphasized that in these and…

A study of effective English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teaching in large classes is presented. The small body of literature on class size and student achievement is reviewed, the "large section" approach is described. The approach is evaluated with data on student performance in an ESL program offered at Montgomery College, (Maryland).…

A handbook to the grammar of Mauritanian Arabic (Hassaniya) is intended for Peace Corps volunteers, and is designed to focus attention on proper grammatical forms. Lesson topics include the article, personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, negation of the implied verb "to be," noun gender, adjective gender, number, "there is/are and…

Discussions of the communicative approach to language teaching are often confusing because different definitions are ascribed to communicative competence in the teaching context. Its definition as the appropriate use of the sociocultural rules for language use in spontaneous interaction is preferred; this definition makes possible more precise…

A study of the optimal combination of language students for participation in an oral group exercise used a story-creating activity in which each student was required to memorize a single sentence and, by discussing the sentences with each other, arrive at a sensible order for them. Three types of verbal interaction were recorded: repetition of the…