The efforts of a group of French foreign-language educators since 1968 to develop innovative teaching methods are chronicled by three participants and placed in the scientific, historical, and social contexts of the time and the institutions in which the experiments took place. (MSE)

Reports on the results of two surveys of college-level instruction in Russian, conducted in 1980 and 1983, designed to measure to what degree phonetics is included as an integral part of the program. The majority of the schools in both surveys indicated a casual attitude towards teaching pronunciation and an overall downward trend in the role of…

Describes a study concerned with distinguishing certain phonological and morphological features of the three dialects of Occitan, a language spoken in the south of France. Results indicate that variations in pronunciation seem to depend on sociolinguistic, as well as geographical factors, and in fact, related dialects and language cannot be…

Discusses the current approaches to interlanguage syntax, focusing on the goal of finding consistency and pattern in syntactic variation. Some themes contributing to descriptive approaches include: the transition from morphosyntax acquisition studies to those of more complex syntax, the emergence of syntax from discourse, explicitness, and the…

Results of research of children's evaluative reactions to bilingual code switching indicate that children by at least 11 years of age are aware of situational, interpersonal, and intergroup factors in dyadic interactions involving interlocutors from distinct ethnolinguistic groups. Suggests that manipulations of the research technique could be…

Uses techniques of the study of conversational analysis in oral language in the study of American Sign Language conversations, and concludes that such conversations are structured in ways that parallel those of spoken language. (FL)

Examines results of a study of samples of babbling production of 6, 8, and 10-month-old infants from French, Arabic, and Cantonese backgrounds. Various judges were asked to identify those infants from their own linguistics community, with the intention of supporting hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of metaphonological characteristics…

Expands on study by Brown and Hanlon which showed that parents seemed more attuned to semantic value of their child's speech rather than grammatical form. However, this more recent study suggests that language learning environment presents subtle cues, distinguishing between well-formed and ill-formed sentences, evidenced by mothers' inclinations…

Investigates expression of part-whole semantic relation by children 3 to 12 years old and indicates that older children prefer its use significantly more often. The part-whole semantic relation was also observed to take several linguistic forms, such as partitive, spatial, and possessive. Age, experimental task format, or type of experimental…

A study tested the hypothesis that manual encoding aids learning in the prelingually deaf. Twenty-four adults who used fingerspelling as their primary means of communication participated in two groups of a paired-associate learning paradigm, using eight study-test trial sequences. Those using fingerspelling showed more recall and a faster learning…

Discusses the use and syntax of the adjective in French. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Reports on experiments designed to explore the way the processing unit depends on the information in the component letters and the information contained in their arrangements in a familiar letter string. Hypotheses were tested by degrading the quality of individual letters and by spacing the letters irregularly. (CLK)

Suggests some reasons why the exploration and description of language function is often an untidy exercise but, none-the-less very rewarding and rich in implication for English teaching. (Author/RK)

This paper examines from a discourse point the inability of a second language learner to comprehend the total discourse in a paragraph even if he understands all of the words and sentences. Research shows that native readers of English in science and technology use presuppositional information lacking in non-natives. (CHK)