Discusses the use of second language teaching methods in teaching English to urban Negro children. This article appears in "The Florida FL Reporter special anthology issue, "Linguistic-Cultural Differences and American Education, and has been reprinted from R. Shuy, ed. "Social Dialects and Language Learning (1965). (FWB)

Reports on a research project carried out among three generations of Mexican Americans in an East Texas community in order to determine their relative competence in English and Spanish. Educational implications are discussed. (FB)

Indicates that the way different languages reduce speech to script affects how visual information is processed in the brain, suggesting that the relation between script and speech underlying all types of writing systems plays an important part in reading behavior. Compares memory performance of native English/Chinese speakers. (JN)

Presents four chief categories of common mistakes in French along with some of their causes and cures. (EKN)

Discusses the theoretical foundations of both basic approaches to contrastive analysis, the predictive, "a priori" version, and the explanatory, "a posteriori" version. Analyzes problems in both approaches, and states that explanatory investigations must be divorced from "classical" contrastive analysis and used with a more realistic methodology…

Argues for the studying of the language learning process itself, rather than doing contrastive or error analyses for determining the source of error in second language acquisiton. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies can help determine the language learning stages. A multidimensional model of language learning is proposed. (PJM)

Examines aspects of foreign language teaching in Nigeria with examples drawn mostly from English phonology and proposes a more practical use of contrastive analysis and error analysis. The approach proposed emphasizes error analysis and discusses criteria based on the extent to which errors affect comprehension. (MES)

An experiment is reported comparing the pluralization patterns exhibited by American college students studying German with those of adult and child native speakers of German. Respondents' pluralization of 30 nonsense words did not reveal significant interference between English and German in this regard. (PMJ)

Presents an investigation of a longitudinal study of the development of past tense and plural inflections in elementary school children enrolled in either a French immersion or a traditional English curriculum. The type of program did not influence the rate of acquisition. (Author/BK)

Describes how, through the use of two diagrams, one can teach the English present-perfect to Iranian students. One diagram consists of a time-line divided into "past" and "non-past." The other uses an oval to indicate a time-span including the present. Both facilitate comprehension of present-perfect meaning. (PJM)

Studies the acquisition of the morphological rules for plural, agentive, and demonstrative suffixes in Dutch. Native-speaking and second language learning children were studied. Both groups showed acquisition orders for plural and agentive, and the second-language group showed interference in acquiring the agentive. Morphological acquisition thus…

Discusses two experiments designed to test the following hypothesis: translation which proceeds from surface structure to surface structure causes greater interference than delayed interpretation across languages that stores the ideas in deep memory and expresses them later in the target language. (Author/CFM)

An experiment with 100 German students of French showed that with the word "profond" the students' semantic associations were based on the mother tongue, whereas with the word "rapide" they were more oriented to the French syntax. Semantic problems are both linguistic and sociocultural in nature. (IFS/WGA)

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)