Presents an interview with Dave Johnson. Considers how to handle classes with students who have not only differing levels of English language fluency, but also speak many different languages. Discusses particular kinds of poems or themes that work especially well for English as a Second Language instruction. (SG)

This investigation was undertaken to address questions about topic familiarity and disfluencies during oral descriptive discourse of adult speakers. Participants expressed more attributes when the topic was familiar than when it was unfamiliar. Fillers and lexical pauses were the most frequent disfluencies. The mean duration of each hesitation…

Medications with dopamine antagonist properties, such as haloperidol, and those with serotonin reuptake inhibitor properties, such as clomipramine, have been shown to improve fluency. To examine the degree to which each of these two pharmacological mechanisms might independently affect fluency, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, paroxetine,…

The purpose of this study was to identify potential general outcome indicators (GOIs) of language proficiency. Brief narratives were elicited from 45 kindergarten, first-grade, and third-grade children using single-picture scenes and a standardized protocol. Measures of language productivity, verbal fluency, and grammaticality were examined for…

The notion of "fluency" is most often associated with spoken-language phenomena such as stuttering. The present article investigates the relevance of considering fluency in writing. The basic argument for raising this question is empirical--it follows from a focus on difficulties in written and spoken language as manifestations of different…

When immigrant youth come to the United States, they must learn to interact with dominant and cultural groups as part of the adjustment process. The current study investigated whether the association between Chinese immigrant high school students' (N = 286) English fluency, academic and career/college help-seeking, multidimensional acculturation,…

This paper focuses on the effectiveness of direct instruction in improving non-native student achievement in English learning. The study involved two groups in two English classes. Groups were selected from two different elementary public schools in the State of Kuwait. Study parameters were derived from a review of the literature and scientific…

Parental involvement at school offers unique opportunities for parents, and this school-based involvement has important implications for children's academic and behavioral outcomes. The authors used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001) to examine race and immigrant…

This study was designed to provide answers to three questions: Does language facility decrease as a person ages? What effect does educational level have on language facility as people age? and, Does language facility vary significantly between the sexes as age increases? Subjects for the study were 59 females and 30 males between the ages of 60…

Discusses different approaches for determining second language proficiency norms to be set by employers for personnel, all involving varying degrees of emphasis on linguistic proficiency on the one hand, and communicative competence on the other. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Discusses some of the problems of language education and concludes that during the middle school years, children are potentially very aware of language and receptive to new ways of exploring and exploiting it. More needs to be learned about this critical stage of language development. (JM)

A cross-sectional research study and a longitudinal research study failed to replicate previous research findings that indicated a linear relationship between age and mean length of utterance during the preschool years. Instead, a deceleration in age curves, particularly beyond about 36 months, was observed in each sample. (Author/CB)

Suggests that the stressing skills are the basic transfer skills which guide the student toward efficient pronunciation as an independent user of the dictionary. (TO)

Presented at "Translation 73," a conference on the present state of literary translation, Columbia University, March 30, 1973. (DD)