A collection of papers addresses three aspects of the learning and use of French as a second language in Africa. The first two chapters look at the sociolinguistic dimension; the first examines the language question and language consciousness in parts of Africa where French was once or is still used as an official or "second" language.…

In the last four decades, many of the studies on contrastive linguistics have been intended for and directed to second language teachers, on the assumption that a major problem in language learning arises from interference caused by structural differences in the native and target languages. However, this effort has had little impact on the…

A study of advanced English learners' use or avoidance of English idioms is described. The investigation looked at whether the subjects would attempt to use English idioms in a translation task containing idioms, or would instead use non-idiomatic synonyms or paraphrase. It also looked at which idioms are used and which are avoided: those that are…

The correlation between a bilingual's usage of grammatical morphemes from one of his/her languages and his/her language dominance is examined. The subject is a three-year-old Danish/English bilingual who code-switches at the morpheme level even though she has never been exposed to a code-switching bilingual community. Co-occurrence restrictions…

Lexical interference in the recall of adult Finnish/Swedish bilinguals with Finnish dominant is studied. The error patterns of short-term recall of words presented by category in either Swedish or Finnish were examined for translations, lexical substitutions, and intrusions or false recalls of non-occurring words. Individual differences in…

Twenty linguistic features found in essays of Creole-speaking students taking remedial writing courses at Hunter College are discussed and illustrated. The students spoke a creole or post-creole language as their mother tongue. The language varieties, which are those most frequently encountered in East Coast urban centers from Boston to Miami, are…

Since 1971 the approach adopted in the teaching of English phonetics in Denmark has been a contrastive one. In this paper it is argued that although the original contrastive hypothesis (Lado 1957) has to be modified and weakened, a contrastive approach is highly useful in learning and teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language. Selected…

This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to investigate some of the effects of bilingualism on perception. The subjects were Icelandic monolinguals and Icelandic-English bilinguals. The phonetic parameter under investigation was duration. The experiment was designed to test which of the following three hypotheses accurately…

This paper focuses on those aspects of which teachers must be aware when teaching university students in Hong Kong. These aspects include cultural factors, the influence of political, social, and educational developments in Hong Kong over the years, and the students' feelings of achievement in attending the university. In terms of language,…

The existence of a global language proficiency factor is discussed. This factor, cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP), is directly related to IQ and to other aspects of academic achievement. It accounts for the bulk of reliable variance in a wide variety of language learning measures. Three propositions concerning CALP are reviewed. (1)…

Foreign students in American colleges and universities experience difficulty with various aspects of English composition, especially grammar, mechanics, syntax, sentence and paragraph structure, and report writing. One way to deal with the situation is to set up a composition course in ESL in which the specific problems of non-native speakers are…

This textbook is designed as a first-year course at the undergraduate level. It is specifically aimed at students with no prior knowledge of Armenian, and emphasis has been placed on the numerous subtleties and nuances of Armenian which might seem strange or difficult to English speakers. In the text, stress has been put on explaining the grammar…

This book, written for those who have no formal training in linguistics but who have an interest in language or language teaching, is meant as a practical text for use in introductory courses in Applied Linguistics. Its emphasis is on second language teaching, but it is also of interest to those who teach native speakers because it covers the…

This selective bibliography lists 4 books and 14 journal articles dealing with Portuguese-English contrastive studies. The entries range in date from 1948 to 1972 with the majority published since 1965. The books cited are Brazilian or European publications and the articles appeared in well-known Brazilian or American pedagogical language…

Contrastive analysis is vitally associated with foreign language teaching. A competent bilingual's intuition about the relationship of the forms in the two languages is the most important part of the valid data for analysis. By means of contrastive analysis major grammatical problems for American students learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) noun…