A comparison of the oral and written performance of college students of French as a second language taught by traditional methods and by use of tape recordings found that the written task was performed equally well by both groups but that the oral tasks were performed better by students taught with tapes. (Author/MSE)

An extracurricular program in an Australian university French language program that brings together adults of varying ages and nationalities for oral language development activities is described. The program uses improvisation, psychodrama and role playing, and suggestopedia all together to develop a theme or in alternation, for creativity and…

Reports results of the administration of a battery of tests of oral language skills to blind braille readers (N=15). Three skills were tested: phoneme deletion, sentence completion, and morphological analysis. Participants were congenitally blind high school students. Subjects differed from sighted readers only in the ability to perform…

An annotated bibliography cites 11 publications on a variety of topics in linguistic research produced since 1986. Topics include child language, oral language, a speech synthesizer, French speech, the free expression approach to language learning, French language teaching methods, and French for special purposes. (MSE)

Analyzes oral narrative told to peers by a Black girl and compares it to one told to an adult female by a White middle-class girl. Proposes that the White girl's style is compatible with school-based values governing speech and writing, while the Black girl's style is compatible with cultures emphasizing verbal mastery but is not compatible with…

Beginning braille readers may benefit from an integrated-literacy curriculum which reflects the interrelationships of oral language, reading, and writing, and stresses the pleasurable and purposeful aspects of literacy. Integrating braille materials into daily curriculum activities can assist students to make the read/write connection and to begin…

Proposes the use of the oral activity "pyramid discussion," involving students in stimulating small-group problem-solving tasks that encourage the practice of both listening and speaking skills, in order to increase advanced English-as-a-Second-Language students' seminar and discussion skills. (CB)

Thirty-six children, aged four-five, completed four vocabulary measures: Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, Picture Vocabulary subtest of the Test of Oral Language Development, Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test, and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. Only moderate correlations were found among these tests, implying that a…

Examines the conditions under which oral translation from a first language to a second language can be used as an exercise to build vocabulary. Depending upon the teaching situation, oral translation can be made both interesting and useful while being compatible with communicative approaches to language teaching. (Author/CB)

Examination of the lexical compensatory strategies Dutch students of English used in a picture-naming task, a story retell task, and an oral interview showed that proficiency level was inversely related to the number of compensatory strategies the subjects used. The type of strategy was not related to proficiency level. (33 references) (Author/CB)

An analysis of the English word stress placement of six native Arabic speakers and six native English speakers studying Arabic revealed that, while most of the native English subjects produced the expected word stress, the Arab subjects placed stress on English words in conformity with Arabic stress patterns. (CB)

Reports on collaborative research covering three areas: (1) the teacher's objective for a particular activity; (2) learners' achievement; and (3) learners' perceived benefit from the activity. This project involved teachers recording oral activities through observational notes and audiotaping. Additional collaborative research is planned. (six…

Reports on the speech difficulties of four French immersion anglophone students participating in a three-month interlinguistic exchange. Each student was interviewed three times, and the transcripts were analyzed for linguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural errors in oral French and for performance evaluation by the students. (51 references)…

Develops the idea of a phonetic-access dictionary by which the isolated spoken word is looked up directly in a phonetically transcribed lexicon of either the tradlitional hard-copy or the more flexible magnetic-media form. Typical applications and benefits to the EFL learner are presented. (58 references) (Author/CK)

Reviews theoretical arguments from a longitudinal study of 1 Dutch child (age 3;8.13 at start) for considering production as a source of input for analysis and presents empirical evidence supporting the output-as-input hypothesis for the blending of the Dutch words "wats" and "iets." Evidence suggests the child analyzed his own…