Gives a brief description of the features of Esperanto: phonetic spelling, a regular grammar with no exceptions to rules, an international vocabulary with a rule for adding new words, and a word-building system making full use of affixes. (Author/MES)

Proposes an analysis of German passive based upon internal structure rather than translation conventions from Latin and Greek. Claims that this approach leads to a description of the perfect participle as an adjectival complement, which eliminates the classification of a passive voice for German and simplifies the learning task. (MES)

In response to his article describing a new English-language corpus designed to reflect current usage, the author agrees that extreme forms of corpus-driven language teaching are inappropriate but also that more corpus-based language instruction is needed, and that the language teaching can only benefit from better language description. (MSE)

The problem of teaching the use of the verbs "ser" and "estar" in Spanish can be only partially addressed by current linguistic explanations. In the absence of rules that will enable the student to predict correct sentences using the verbs, the most effective teaching technique is to use a situational-functional approach providing students with…