Attempts to clarify the notion of language competence and draws on its relevance to language teaching practices. Language use competence may involve the adjustment of pre-assembled and memorized patterns and not so much the generation of expressions by direct reference to rules. (Author/CB)

Bilingualism, to be cognitively and academically beneficial, must be based on adequately developed first language skills. Two hypotheses, developmental interdependence and threshold, are integrated into a bilingual education model which treats background, child input, and educational treatment to explain educational outcomes. (Author/MH)

Describes attempts to formalize and characterize a theory of communicative competence, focusing on the advantages of a preference model (which identifies and grades learning variables in order of importance) and of models developed on the premise of parallel distributed processing (which suggest that such rule-based processing are in fact gross…