Responds to the preceding article, "Impacts of the New Economy on Learning Needs." The article argues that English as a Second Language (ESL) should seek not just to equip learners with employable skills, but also to engage in examining society critically, to enable ESL learners to defend and extend their interests in society. (19…

Summarizes the experiences of workers from non-English-speaking backgrounds (NESB) in accessing safety information. The article examines the issue through the workers' eyes and focuses on the potential relationships between language and literacy and workplace health and safety and a concern for the reasons why some NESB workers are losers in…

Discusses how understanding translation in new ways can enrich language programs and serve today's students' more practical needs, noting that learning to be fluent is not the same as learning to be a translator. The article offers suggestions for preparing students to understand what translation entails and shows how translation can stimulate…

Examined the view that the variation in bilingual short-term memory capacity is determined by differential rates of subvocal rehearsal between the languages. Auditory memory span and articulation time were measured for three bilingual groups who spoke Finnish at home and Swedish at school, and either Finnish of Swedish in both the home and the…

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…

Infants prefer to listen to happy speech. To assess influences of speech affect on early lexical processing, 7.5- and 10.5-month-old infants were familiarized with one word spoken with happy affect and another with neutral affect and then tested on recognition of these words in fluent passages. Infants heard all passages either with happy affect…

Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also…

Language teaching methodology has been changing over a period of time. The teacher-centered approach is gradually giving way to learner-centered approach. Until a decade ago, the role of the teacher was that of a constant donor of knowledge and corrector of learner errors. But, the paradigms are shifting and teacher roles are altering. The teacher…

The purpose of the present study was to examine relations between children's emotional reactivity, emotion regulation and stuttering. Participants were 65 preschool children who stutter (CWS) and 56 preschool children who do not stutter (CWNS). Parents completed the Behavior Style Questionnaire (BSQ) [McDevitt S. C., & Carey, W. B. (1978). A…

This article describes how recent trends in improving literacy outcomes in the early years of schooling have provided the opportunity for Camberwell Primary School to identify the "best practice" that promotes high levels of achievement in English literacy and transfer this learning and knowledge to the French literacy program. The linguistic…

There is an increasing amount of research and discussion about the characteristics and learning needs of "Generation 1.5." These learners share characteristics of both first- and second-generation immigrants; they have grown up and been educated in the United States, but live in homes where English is not the primary language. They often…

This digest provides useful information on starting an elementary school foreign language (FLES) program. Individual sections address the following: (1) cautions in planning a FLES program; (2) initiating the planning process; (3) designing the program, with special attention given to scheduling and language choice; (4) programs that lead to high…

Guidelines for Hebrew language proficiency are presented in two companion volumes which are identical except that one gives examples of various linguistic forms in Hebrew and the other provides them in Roman script. These guidelines are based on the generic guidelines published in 1986 by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.…

Study abroad is not a frill of the foreign language major's curriculum, but rather a component that is crucial to the linguistic preparation of a successful language teacher. During the study abroad experience, the student can obtain the ability to use the language freely and spontaneously, thus helping create an atmosphere of excitement and…

The use of two types of commercially available Apple computer educational software in English for the development of accuracy and fluency in students of English as a second language is described. One type of program is aimed at the drilling and practice of grammar in English. Some of these programs have interesting formats and allow the teacher to…