This study examined the relationship between holistic judgements of oral proficiency and objective measures of syntactic maturity of 107 Chinese students of English as a Foreign Language. It found significant differences in objective measures of syntactic maturity and that demonstrated levels of syntactic maturity varied according to the task. (48…

Examination of the simultaneous communication for two secondary and two elementary school teachers showed high exact and essential equivalence between signed and spoken portions of utterances (92 percent). Although over 90 percent of the utterances contained at least one morpheme mismatch between English and signed main verbs, subjects,…

Reports findings from the second year of a three-year study following four children from a prekindergarten Head Start program through first grade. Investigates the impact of kindergarten instruction on the development of literacy. Suggests that children may define writing and reading as their teachers' instructional practices dictate. (SR)

To establish preliminary baselines in terms of instruction time and the teaching methodology used, the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview was administered as a final exam to all University of Michigan first- through fourth-semester German students. After one and also after three semesters, the majority of students were Intermediate Mid; after four…

Reports on a pilot study that attempted to uncover, through classroom observations, how experienced social studies teachers explore and reinforce student understanding of concepts that comprise the adopted curriculum. Particular attention is paid to the use of metaphors, analogies, and similes as examples or reinforcements of verbal or written…

An analysis of the responses of 83 English language instructors and 251 college students to a survey regarding their attitudes toward Malaysian English, a still-evolving derivative of Standard British English, showed that younger persons had much more tolerance for Malaysian English, which could be accepted as a legitimate…

Describes the research literature on diglossia, presents the practicality of Formal Spoken Arabic (FSA) from the training point of view, and gives a brief overview of features of FSA as taught at the Foreign Service Institute that have popularized it for teaching spoken proficiency skills to students of Arabic as a foreign language. (30…

Analysis of the phonological influence of English on Yoruba found such influences as violation of phonotactic constraints, assimilation of English sounds with those of Yoruba sounds, irregular phoneme correspondences, and resistance to new syllable types. (19 references) (Author/CB)

A Polish study of foreign language (FL) interactional discourse concludes that strategic competence, consisting of the use of communication strategies in interactional discourse, plays a relatively unimportant role in the performance of low proficiency FL learners who are not used to taking part in interaction. (27 references) (LB)

Four language classroom activities are described, including a food game, a culture and language activity based on a Paris Metro ticket, an exercise in the use of definite and indefinite articles using a film poster, and a classroom adaptation of a fairy tale for dramatic oral presentation. (MSE)

Reports on an alternative approach to the face-to-face interview for eliciting speech samples to evaluate second-language proficiency, discussing the reliability and validity of the Indonesian Speaking Test, an example of the tape-mediated simulated oral proficiency interview method. (18 references)(CB)

Presents a pair of innovations, originally developed and used for teaching Mandarin, that are now being applied to the teaching of Cantonese, Vietnamese, and Thai, involving a double system of representation to encourage easier pronunciation and long-term learning; and a special sequencing for presenting the tones. (36 references) (CB)

A longitudinal analysis of the spontaneous speech (first-person pronouns and reflexives) of three children tests the claim that children's poor performance in binding and coreference is due to performance factors. Children appear to understand the principles of binding and coreference at the earliest stages of language development. (33 references)…

A discussion of the use of video as instructional material in the second-language classroom looks at the relationship between the visual and the verbal and offers a number of exercises using each, together and separately. (MSE)

The claim that multiple-birth children use "twin language" was investigated by describing and comparing the phonological characteristics of the speech of 19 sets of multiple birth children (aged 2-4) and by measuring multiple-birth children's understanding of their twins' or triplets' context-free speech. Results indicated that multiple…