This book highlights the roles of several individual difference (ID) variables on the language learning process, exploring them from both the students' and the teachers' perspectives. It presents the results of a large-scale, mixed-methods investigation which was conducted with secondary school pupils and their teachers in Hungary. The…

Offers a systematic statement of the lexical differences between "noch" and "schon," which should serve teachers better than their intuitive feelings for those words. (IFS/WGA)

Presents a learning transfer principle, based on transfer theory and contrastive analysis, as a solution to the inductive-deductive controversy in second language teaching methodology. (AM)

Demonstrates how Sector Analysis theory can serve as a model for the contrastive analysis of the grammars of any two languages. Examples are provided for English and Hausa. (AM)

Follow up to a previous study of the use of "por" and "para," this study analyzes "ser,""estar," and "haber" for lexical selection in relation to their functions and also for errors in tense, mode, aspect, agreement, and invented forms and uses of copula in simplified or reduced utterances. Data were from 20 oral examinations of Peace Corps…

A study compares and contrasts a set of English and Spanish prepositions of location in the context of prototype theory. It seeks to establish the prototype concept of each preposition and the degrees of prototypicality by testing for native-speaker choices of examples that illustrate best the most basic use of the preposition. The prepositions…

By comparing Russian and English on the phonological and grammatical levels, guidelines are offered for teachers of English as a second language to Russian students. (CFM)

Ten Japanese subjects in Arizona participated in a study that confirmed that Japanese-specific rhetoric is transferred in a native Japanese English-as-a-Second-Language student's composition, and examined the extent to which the transferred rhetorical organization is discordant with native English readers' expectations. (26 references) (LB)

Deals with English stress problems for Iraqis under three main headings: single-stressed words, double-stressed words, and unstressed syllables. While stress in Arabic is predictable, stress in English is not. The Iraqi will transfer native-language stress patterns to English. Errors cause miscommunication and are difficult to pinpoint. (PJM)

A study investigated whether English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students' understanding of culturally-loaded words (those that are similar in primary meaning but different in connotation between the two languages) approximates that of native speakers of English, and how much English proficiency level may account for the extent of this…

Outlines a lesson in a college Spanish class in which the students were shown the close relationship between Spanish and Portuguese. This kind of class not only makes the students more conscious of the relatedness of languages but also can stimulate their interest in studying another language. (CFM)

The syntactic distribution and behavior of five English and Persian "measure" nouns and their adjectives are compared. From this, errors attributable to transference and those due to inconsistencies in English are enumerated. A unified analytic model of Persian errors in learning English suggests useful teaching strategies. (PMJ)

Describes a sequence for teaching the Russian passive construction to exemplify how a learning sequence based on a contrastive analysis and on error analysis can lessen student errors. These errors are caused either by interference from the first language or over-generalization in the second language. (PMJ)

A language school teacher explains some of his methods for teaching beginning French, including course content, use of drill and homework, pronunciation, and the use of choral speaking to teach stress and intonation. (SJL)

Derivations of the term "gerund" are examined as they pertain to native English speakers learning French, Italian, and/or Spanish. The form's etymology is chronicled from Latin, and its current usage in student textbooks in the three languages is examined. A solution to the terminological confusion surrounding the term is proposed. (41…