Current ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Oral Language Proficiency Guidelines are based on an overly narrow view of communicative language proficiency. However, the guidelines do provide a basis for the development of effective teaching and testing methods. (CB)

Subjects studied one of three maps varying in feature configuration and spatial distribution before reading or listening to a related story. There were no differences in recall due to mode of text presentation, but the type of map profoundly influenced recall from both the test and the map. (Author/GDC)

Describes six oral language games that can help English as a second language students practice language patterns in a spontaneous yet meaningful context. (HOD)

Using Hindi and Urdu as examples, illustrates the shortcomings in the definition of South Asian languages that has been attempted in Britain so far. Argues that description and definition of a language have to include aspects of culture, religion, script, politics, and the speakers' own perception of their language and language choice. (SED)

This study indicated that Anglo-Australian and Greek-Australian adolescents evaluate speakers of standard (Australian) and Greek-accented speech differently. Evaluations varied according to context and to sex of listener: Anglo-Australian females favored Australian over Greek accents only slightly, while males showed much greater differences in…

Describes a study that determines if an interrelationship exists between cognitive level, gestural development, and spoken English development in five hearing-impaired preschool children. Results suggest that a deaf child's cognitive development may be related to his/her communicative ability, especially in terms of pragmatic-semantic…

Examines first- and third-grade children and college adults' ability to make excuse inferences about a speaker's use of an utterance and to modify those inferences appropriately upon receiving later information. Possible reasons for children's inflexibility were examined by varying the difficulty of relating the excuse interpretation and…

Examines the role of suprasegmental phonology in speech processing and its implications for reading instruction; also reviews evidence for the hypothesis that prosodic features cue the boundaries of perceptually functional units in spoken sentences, thus assisting the listener in the segmentation of verbal information. (FL)

Reviews the psycholinguistic view of the relationship between reading and written and spoken language and presents teaching strategies for beginning readers based on this view. (FL)

Describes and gives examples of "chatter chain," a method of teaching pupils to develop their French oral skills from a single question and answer that lead to a short conversation. This method combines the main linguistic structures to be learned with enought new grammar to allow a fair degree of pupil choice. (SED)

A participant in a British teacher workshop that focused on student talk describes the progress of the group toward defining the types of language they wanted to focus on in the classroom and the group's publication of weekly progress reports. (HTH)

This book offers a much needed alternative to the more traditional texts used to teach writing instruction. Grounded in history, the book clarifies changing theoretical and practical approaches to teaching writing, critically assessing each approach in relation to the social and political movements of the day, both within and beyond the…

The population of most Minnesota communities has dramatically changed over the past ten years. The Minnesota State Demographic Center reports the Twin Cities area has the largest Hmong, Somali, and Liberian communities in the United States. In some communities where both jobs and affordable housing are available, the percentage of English as a…

This book offers a much needed alternative to the more traditional texts used to teach writing instruction. Grounded in history, the book clarifies changing theoretical and practical approaches to teaching writing, critically assessing each approach in relation to the social and political movements of the day, both within and beyond the…

This research brief highlights key findings from a study that is a subset of a larger study being conducted jointly by NCSALL's John Strucker and Kentaro Yamamoto and Irwin Kirsch of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). This study builds on the proposition that a reader's comprehension performance is largely determined by his or her abilities in…