Suggests the use of the Qualitative Analysis System in conjunction with the Informal Reading Inventory to analyze student reading difficulties. Includes instructions and analysis and profile sheets for using the system correctly. (TJ)

Reviews the use of miscue analysis in conjunction with the informal reading inventory and recommends the use of a miscue mini-form to refine the identification of reading levels and error pattern analysis. Includes a copy of the mini-form. (TJ)

A six-year-old with a language problem responded consistently to 100 locative commands by putting objects in containers and on flat surfaces regardless of the preposition or order of the nouns in the commands. (Author/CL)

On the basis of German compositions written by second- and third-year English students, with specific reference to the placement of "nicht," it is shown that performance is affected by the mother tongue, but also by the level of experience in using the target language. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

A study examined the effects of overt phonologic impairment on the phonological awareness, verbal working memory, and letter knowledge of 29 children with phonologic impairment and 16 controls (ages 3-6). Children with phonologic impairment performed significantly worse on tasks of verbal working memory, phoneme segmentation, and letter…

Summarizes results from theory, research, and practice in technological assisted language instruction aiming toward an integrated theory of what will be available in this area in the 21st century. The study focuses on conceptualizing the use of advanced technologies in language instruction. (25 references) (Author/CK)

Challenges the prevalent misconception among many students that the grammatical gender system of Spanish is transparent. Data concerning the number of exceptions in gender assignment in Spanish is presented along with samples of student production. (VWL)

This study compared responses of 16 pupils either with or without autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and matched for gender and verbal ability. Subjects' responses to various pictures were categorized. Results suggested errors made by the two groups differed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Errors made by pupils with ASD were largely…

Describes a think-aloud, oral feedback procedure that English-as-a-Second-Language teachers may use to respond to student writing as interested native-language readers intent on comprehending the written message, and not as editors or proofreaders. (Author/CB)

A study was undertaken to test the theory that canonical sentence schemas can sometimes assign argument structure to verbs. The theory has the advantage of explaining errors without postulating the acquisition of erroneous lexical entries that have to be learned, and it can be extended to other kinds of errors in the choice and placement of…

A phonological framework was used to describe the speech errors of 13 orally trained hearing-impaired children, ages 6 to 16. Among findings were that initial consonant inventories were larger than final consonant inventories and that production accuracy was significantly related to size of consonant inventories. (Author/DB)

Outlines a contrastive analysis model and a non-contrastive analysis model for studying interlanguage in strictly bilingual settings, and suggests a bidimensional framework, including both linguistic and curricular components, for studying interlanguage in multilingual settings. (21 references) (CB)

Studies of impaired reading processes in children with slow digit naming speeds found that, for first- through third-graders, character-identification automaticity was equally important to the direct-access and speech-recoding routes of word recognition. For 4th- through 10th-graders, the correlation of digit naming speed with reading…

Through analyses of text corpora, sentence completion, and self-paced reading, examined role of structurally defined parsing principles, local information (lexically specific biases), and contextual information (referential pragmatics) in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Subjects were 32 undergraduate native English speakers. Found that local and…

In a study of the application natural language processing to second-language instruction, two versions of the Nihongo-CALI (computer-assisted language instruction) system were developed. Empirical data support the possibility/effectiveness of intelligent CALI to facilitate second-language acquisition. (19 references) (LB)