Errors can be considered concrete representations of stages through which one must go in order to acquire one's native language and a second language. It has been discovered that certain errors appear systematically, revealing an approximate system, or "interlanguage," behind the erroneous utterances. Present research in second language…

The influence of mother-tongue interference is examined on the basis of data from two tests at different levels of English proficiency: a commercial-college level, covering 4-5 years of English studies, involving a composition and translation test, and a preuniversity level, covering 7-8 years of English studies, with a multiple-choice test. A…

This preliminary study examines what the effects of additional time and different media have upon the overall quality of English language learner's written assessment tests. Sixteen intermediate-level students (L1 Cantonese), enrolled at a satellite campus of an American university within Asia, manually wrote a 45-minute timed placement test in…

The case study examined the development of English writing skills in a native Russian-speaking college student with no previous instruction in English as a Second Language. It drew on writing samples from 2 years of English language instruction. Theories of first and second language acquisition, especially in written expression, are analyzed in…

Articles in this annual serial include the following: "Four decades with the Computer" (Winfred P. Lehmann); "The Uses of the Personal Computer in the Humanities" (James W. Marchand); "Digging in the Dictionary: Building a Relational Lexicon To Support Natural Language Processing Applications" (Martha Evans, Judith…

The assessment portfolio is a collection of materials and forms for testing and recording student progress at F.S. Key Elementary School, Arlington, Virginia. The materials are designed for use in an elementary school two-way partial immersion program. Introductory sections discuss the use of portfolios for monitoring student performance and…

This issue of an annual publication on second language teaching contains nine articles. All but one of the these is written in French; each paper, however, is preceded by an English-language abstract. The articles are as follows: "Des cultures, des pubs" ("Cultures, Advertising") (Sophie Bailly, Isabelle Tolle);…

Fourteen articles are presented in this volume on contrastive linguistics. The articles and authors are as follows: "A Brief Falsificationist Look at Contrastive Sociolinguistics" (K. Janicki); "The Locus of French Gender Control" (W. A. Bennett); "On the English Perfect Tense and Current Relevance Implicatures" (J.…

This journal includes current information for English teachers (new publications, resource materials, textbooks, tests, and trends) and these articles: "Reliability in the Oral Bagrut Test" (Raphael Gefen); "A Methodological Approach to 'Rewrite Sentence' Drills" (Eliyahu Galore); "Translation as a Bagrut Subject"…

The language learner is activated by exposure to primary linguistic data in the target language, categorizes that data and deduces from it a system of rules or hypotheses. When the language acquisition process is successful, as is virtually always the case in first language acquisition, the learner's rule system corresponds to that of the speech…

Causes of language fossilization and ways to overcome it are considered. Fossilization is the relatively permanent incorporation of incorrect linguistic forms into a person's second language competence. The discussion is focused on fossilization of incorrect syntactical rules, based on experiences with learners of English as a second language at…

The interlanguage hypothesis stresses that errors are a normal part of the language learning process. At the same time, in the view of many, the teacher has a responsibility to provide short cuts for the learner through appropriate corrective feedback. Conventionally, this has been taken to imply correction of expression by requiring repetition of…

This text, designed to provide teachers and teacher-trainees with a comprehensive and up-to-date grasp of the theoretical foundations of foreign language teaching, is based on the assumption that a teacher-trainee needs to gain broad but systematic knowledge of the process of second language acquisition in order to understand and adapt teaching…

Twelve Spanish-speaking kindergarteners livinq in Los Angeles were tested for usage of English verb tense morphemes through responses elicited during task situations that were dramatized with the use of toy-like realia. The children were first asked to provide a constructed response to questions, and were then given model sentences for immediate…

This book of readings includes: "Language Didactics and Applied Linguistics" (William Mackey); "Psycholinguistics and Second Language Teaching" (H. H. Stern); "Linguistic Theory" (Noam Chomsky); "Some Psycholinguistic Controversies" (John Oller, Jr.); "The Cognitive Strategies of Language Learning" (John Macnamara); "Conditions for Language…