A study investigated the use of pronoun and demonstrative reference and ellipsis as cohesive devices in conversation between interlanguage-speaking parents, their children, and the children's classmates. The 24 subjects included eight Italian-, Greek-, and Macedonian-speaking migrant parents, their primary-school-age children, and the children's…

After a survey of current methods of studying lexical acquisition, none of which are really suitable for studying how specific words are acquired and used by adult learners and how such usage differs from that of native speakers, a method is proposed for the study of such qualitative aspects of second language lexical acquisition. Learners are…

A study was carried out of the 15 to 20% of immigrants enrolled in French second language classes in the "Centres d'Orientation et de Formation des Immigrants" (COFI) in Quebec, who learn little or no French after 8 weeks of an intensive course and repetitions of the course. This report presents the data gathered in the course of the…

When analyzing data concerning interlanguage variation and discourse domain, it appears that learners may exhibit more control in their work-domain than in their life-story domain. Data were collected on the Dutch-French interlanguage of two university economics students to investigate the relation of domain to variation in utterances. (Author/…

Analyzes the results of a 1975 study of a 12-year-old Spanish speaker with regard to his acquisition of negation in English. The hypothesis of formulating/testing second language learning is reaffirmed with an alternate explanation of variation in syntactic forms. Results show that free variation is functionally determined. (LMO)

This issue of "Working Papers in Educational Linguistics" begins with "Negative Evidence in Language Classroom Activities: A Study of Its Availability and Accessibility to Language Learners" (Teresa Pica and Gay N. Washburn), which revisits the issue of negative evidence in second language classrooms. The second paper,…

Discusses the value of classifying the errors adult language learners make and of comparing them to errors made by children. It is suggested that teachers correct student errors in the same way parents correct children's errors in order to encourage successful learning. (CFM)

Examines the variable realization of the third person singular present tense by learners of English as a Second Language at elementary and intermediate levels of proficiency in unplanned discourse in South Africa. (35 references) (Author/CK)

Defends the full transfer/full access (FT/FA) model, which hypothesizes that the initial state of second-language (L2) acquisition is the final state of L1 acquisition (full transfer) and failure to assign a representation to input data will force subsequent restructuring. The article considers two other competing hypotheses as well as several…

This article focuses on the incidence of lexical transfer as a communication/learning strategy in the written English of 32 beginning Hispanic, disadvantaged students learning English as a Second Language at Bayamon University Technical College in Puerto Rico. Subjects were asked to write a detailed description in English of a simple ink drawing…

A study investigated how a second language (L2) learner's writing skills develop in a second-language context. The three research questions addressed the effect of: (1) first-language (L1) literacy skills, (2) L2 proficiency, and (3) the instructional context on L2 writing. Subjects were 70 university French students. Data were drawn from 300…

A study investigated how Chinese characters (hanzi) were taught and learned in a first-year Chinese language class in an American university. Traditionally the teaching of hanzi in higher education has taken one of four approaches: radical; high-frequency-hanzi; phonetic; and non-teaching. The four approaches are analyzed from the second language…

A study of the relationship between university-level second language development and previous language and other experience is described. The study, in its early stages at the time of writing, is being conducted at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and involves students of French, German, Italian, and Spanish. This report describes the subjects…

Past perceptions of the role of grammar in the second language syllabus have been limited by the attitude that grammatical content should be addressed directly in the language classroom and that it is limited to language items and rules with definable boundaries. However, language has properties crucial to its use for communication that are not…

The language community of urban Hispanics in the United States and educational strategies that are appropriate for teaching English as a second language (ESL) in a bilingual/bidialectal language situation are considered. Within the New York City Hispanic community of Puerto Ricans, several varieties of English have been noted: standard English,…