Studied the case of bilingual acquisition across two modalities to examine diverging hypotheses about the types of knowledge underlying early bilingualism. Three children acquiring Langues des Signes Quebecoise and French, and three children acquiring French and English were videotaped over a year while novel and familiar speakers of each child's…

Studied the linguistic competence in the written language of deaf children and adults and the linguistic development in children and adolescents with Williams Syndrome. Presents qualitative data on spoken and written Italian from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies conducted over the last 10 years. Studying these two different populations can…

Criticizes the circumstance that limits the opportunity for students to speak French in casual conversation to an extent that would permit them to truly improve their command of the language. The article maintains that giving students the opportunity to develop on their own the ability to express themselves orally is a valuable teaching goal.…

Presents various activities for use in the foreign language classroom. These include listening to songs to develop an awareness of intonation and rhythm, reading literature to learn the functions of relative pronouns, engaging in conversation to become proficient in a second language, and preparing a weather report to improve one's vocabulary…

Using a corpus of 18 child-adult conversations, this study distinguished adult utterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgment (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance served a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usually responded to by children, but the form of response…

Reports on the development of the Matriculation English Test oral subtest (METOS) in China. Having undergone repeated piloting and moderation, the METOS format has attained validity on the strength of its being a message-based test of the interactive and contextualized use of English. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on question-response sequences in academic and work settings and examines the type of description of questioning conventionally offered in published English language teaching materials for higher-level learners. (Author/VWL)

A study identified second-person singular pronoun usage among Salvadoran speakers living in Houston, Texas, to see what changes, if any, have been caused by contact with other Spanish speakers with different speech patterns. Although the results confirm some linguistic behavior observed by others, some unexpected facts and diverging trends were…

Investigates agreement among teacher-, self-, and peer-assessments of students in the presence of peer feedback. This is done in the context of oral presentation skills of first year undergraduate students of ethnic Chinese background. Findings how that when assessment criteria are firmly set, peer feedback enables students to judge the…

Discusses part of a large-scale survey on the oral performance of advanced French-as-a-second-language students, as represented by recorded speech. Although schwa rarely leads to semantic confusions, its analysis in word-median or monosyllabic contexts shows interesting phonostylistic variations. (Author/VWL)

The communicative approach to language instruction emphasizes ways to increase student-talk and decrease teacher-talk. It necessitates including the production or performance stage in lesson plans to give students the opportunity to use the new language in simulated real-life situations. (Author/VWL)

In investigating the use of authentic texts, this study asked college students of the German language to rate 53 situations (composed of 12 authenticity factors) on level of authenticity, contribution to language learning, ease/difficulty, and resulting anxiety/enjoyment. Learners enjoyed interacting with authentic materials but were appreciative…

When presented with stimuli that contain illegal consonant clusters, Japanese listeners tend to hear an illusory vowel that makes their perception conform to the phonotactics of the language. Assesses an alternate hypothesis that this illusion is due to a top-down lexical effect. (Author/VWL)

Explores the close link between perception and production of sounds and suggests that teachers need to ensure that their students can distinguish between individual sounds of a language, particularly those that do not exist in their native language. Describes a study in which two groups of Chinese learners of English were compared in their ability…

In a study of teenage learners of French, the aspect of teachers' language that was found to be most responsive to the ability of their students was lexical diversity. Focuses on this finding using a new measure. (Author/VWL)