This study of 67 intermediate grade students with reading difficulties found that students in a peer-mediated sustained reading condition performed better than peer-mediated repeated reading students and control students receiving typical reading instruction, on fluency but not on comprehension. No effect for the level of text difficulty was…

Examines the development of a pilot questionnaire used for a series of investigations into aspects of language learning in further and higher education. The questionnaire was administered to over 3,000 learners of French, Spanish, German, English, and Russian attending 12 British universities and 6 schools/colleges of further education. (16…

Presents case studies of three high-achieving learners who demonstrated a variety of motivations and strategy uses according to their individual differences. The primary focus of the study is on the strategies employed by learners during their school days in their native Germany. The three studies demonstrate a wide range of strategy uses and…

Speech material gathered from Dutch-English bilinguals in Australia questioned in 1971 and 1987 was analyzed, showing no evidence of attrition in Dutch. It is concluded that first-language attrition does not necessarily occur in an immigrant setting and that immigrants who maintain their language in the first years of their stay will likely remain…

Discusses issues related to psycholinguistics since second-language acquisition (SLA) research has emerged as a scientific discipline. These issues include the debate about the place of an innate universal grammar in language acquisition, basic cognitive mechanisms underlying SLA, and pedagogical implications of recent developments in the…

Examines the success of phonemic tone-marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language that uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. Participants from a variety of different age groups and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography, were tested on location in the Western…

Follows the approach developed in Dendrinos (1992) for English-as-a-foreign-language textbook analysis and presents a content analysis of 11 Indian "Common Errors in English" (CEIE) guidebooks to illustrate how access to English is institutionally withheld from large parts of the Indian population. (Author/VWL)

Responds to the preceding article, "Impacts of the New Economy on Learning Needs." The article argues that English as a Second Language (ESL) should seek not just to equip learners with employable skills, but also to engage in examining society critically, to enable ESL learners to defend and extend their interests in society. (19…

Summarizes the experiences of workers from non-English-speaking backgrounds (NESB) in accessing safety information. The article examines the issue through the workers' eyes and focuses on the potential relationships between language and literacy and workplace health and safety and a concern for the reasons why some NESB workers are losers in…

Discusses how understanding translation in new ways can enrich language programs and serve today's students' more practical needs, noting that learning to be fluent is not the same as learning to be a translator. The article offers suggestions for preparing students to understand what translation entails and shows how translation can stimulate…

Examined the view that the variation in bilingual short-term memory capacity is determined by differential rates of subvocal rehearsal between the languages. Auditory memory span and articulation time were measured for three bilingual groups who spoke Finnish at home and Swedish at school, and either Finnish of Swedish in both the home and the…

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…

Infants prefer to listen to happy speech. To assess influences of speech affect on early lexical processing, 7.5- and 10.5-month-old infants were familiarized with one word spoken with happy affect and another with neutral affect and then tested on recognition of these words in fluent passages. Infants heard all passages either with happy affect…

Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also…

There has been relatively little empirical research on the impact of stage of fluency in English of bilingual pupils. However, this issue is increasingly important given growth in the bilingual school population in England of over one-third between 1997 and 2004 to around 10% of the school population. This study evaluates the relationship between…