This article examines issues in language assessment in children exposed to two languages, including arrested language development in preschool children, arrested development and language loss in school-age children, effects of educational policy (especially the devaluation of non-English languages) on bilingualism, problems in primary language…

In the rapidly changing environment of language learning and teaching, electronic literacies have an increasingly important role to play. While much research on new literacies focuses on the World Wide Web, the aim in this study is to investigate the importance of corpus consultation as a new type of literacy which is of particular relevance in…

Second language anxiety has a debilitating effect on the oral performance of speakers of English as a second language. This article describes a research project concerning the conceptualization of second language speaking anxiety, the relationship between anxiety and second language performance, and the major reported causes of second language…

This article, a 5-month ethnographic research in Oaxaca, Mexico, examines various aspects of the literacy curriculum in 2 Mexican primary schools. The author observed and interviewed 35 students in 6th grade and 7 teachers in 2 schools, as well as examined student writing and teaching materials. The research suggests that though the…

It is suggested that Chinese students in China and Chinese Americans have difficulty learning to read in English due to native language interference and to cultural traits and thinking patterns. Reading in English requires overcoming some psychological barriers. A chart outlines the different ways in which a Chinese student would read the same…

Using the nationally representative National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS88) database, the relationships of first language (L1) proficiency to subsequent use of that language (home language maintenance), English proficiency and achievement and English self-concept were examined. Confirmatory factor analysis results showed that L1…

This paper presents several methods of reading instruction that teachers can use with young readers, particularly learners of English as a Second Language (ESL), to help them cope with potential negative effects of background knowledge. Insufficient or inaccurate background knowledge may cause readers to make inferences or interpretations that are…

Correct pronunciation is often a later step in the process of teaching English as a second language. However, a focus on the correct articulation of vowels can significantly improve listening and comprehension skills as well as articulatory skills. Vowels and consonants differ in their acoustic properties. Unlike consonants, vowel sounds are…

A study examined the production of lateral consonants in seven male university students bilingual in Spanish and Catalan who had studied French in elementary and secondary school. A questionnaire elicited information about the subjects' use of each language with parents, with friends, at home, and in school. Each subject then read a 775-word text…

This research study focuses on two interrelated aspects of the development of bilingualism, the development of awareness of two separate linguistic systems and the occurence of interference phenomena. The research was conducted in a small town in East Central Illinois. The sample for the study included all the Mexican-American children enrolled in…

The linguistic theory of contrastive analysis, which provides pragmatic insights into the teaching of foreign languages, can be equally successful when applied to the teaching of one dialect of a language to speakers of its other dialects. This paper briefly illustrates how a theoretically constructed hierarchy of difficulty, originally designed…

This booklet consists of five articles. The first, "Bilingual Education: Reading through Two Languages," by Arturo Luis Gutierrez, stresses the importance of teaching Spanish-speaking children to read first in their native tongue. The second article, "Teaching All Children to Read," by Donald E. Critchlow, discusses methodology and the problems…

This study identified two types of interference between Hungarian and English: phonetic and phonological interference. Four native speakers of Hungarian who are second language speakers of English read a passage containing a wide variety of sounds in different phonological environments. A set of rules mapping American English onto…

The test described here is a particular type of diagnostic test; it is part of a series of tests designed to explore systematically areas of potential lexical difficulty in the English language for French-speaking students of English. The lexical units are considered under their formal, morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. The test has…

Distractors, the incorrect responses to an item on a multiple-choice test, should be designed to create confusion in the minds of some students and to permit a competent student to be able to see that they are wrong. It is possible, by close scrutiny, to isolate the sources of this confusion and, by looking at a statistical analysis, to find out…