Because idioms are omnipresent in the authentic language students are exposed to, to successfully comprehend and produce natural language, learners of a second or foreign language need to possess a good knowledge of idioms and competence in idiom use. This paper examines the approaches to teaching and learning idioms. A discussion of the…

Presents an "expose" of academic jargon that often confuses educators and other readers. The terms are humorously defined to reveal the money and status struggles that protect academics from "unhealthy preoccupation" with teaching and scholarship. (CJH)

Discusses the "nur/erst" translation problem and offers several strategies for determining which one should be used for the English "only." (EKN)

The relationship between Eastern and Western languages is explored. Possible origins and the spread of language over the Eurasian land mass are discussed. (CW)

The language of argumentation, taught increasingly often at the advanced level of French second-language learning, is discussed. Rationale for its teaching, basic concepts within the emerging discipline, and its relationship to traditional language teaching are examined. (MSE)

Explains the rationale for the use of Spanish music in Spanish language classes, and describes students' reactions, how the music is used to help the listening/writing experience, and how recorded commercials in Spanish aid in learning language patterns. (GLR)

Summarizes recent theory on communicative processes in language use, on the creation and exchange of meaning, and on the negotiation of roles in the classroom. Suggests exercises for activating and developing interactive skills between speakers and hearers in the foreign language. (EKN)

The diverse population of a community college requires strategies that heighten motivation and reduce frustration of students trying to master complex foreign language grammatical structures. A "package approach" is described for teaching all object pronouns as extra material for students to enjoy. (Contains five references.) (Author/LB)

Metrical phonology, a linguistic process of phonological stress assessment and diagrammatic simplification of sentence and word stress, is discussed as it is found in the English language with the intention that it may be used in second language instruction. Stress is defined by its physical and acoustical correlates, and the principles of…

Discusses how linguists determine relationships of languages and group them into a family. Presents a crossword puzzle as a student activity, suitable for science and other classes, to determine the Indo-European roots of English words by a comparative method. (SK)

Both aural-oral practice with the sounds of English and formal rules are important in pronunciation instruction, and have a role to play in interlanguage development. Formal rules provide self-evaluation for purposes of self-correction, a process which allows learners to judge or self-correct their own utterances against rule-generated predictions…

Children with language delays often manifest low rates of self-initiated expressive language, particularly in school settings. Children with mild to moderate language delays appear to develop this pattern as a means of coping with situations in which they believe they are unable to perform or may perform poorly. Interactive language training…

This paper describes an educator's decision to change careers from that of foreign service officer to teacher of English as a Second Language is traced to a December 1985 event in Korea in which the American Cultural Center in Kwangju was occupied by protesting Korean students. Analysis of this event and its effect on the educator focuses on the…

Discusses the phonetic module that increases the rate of information flow, establishes the parity between sender and receiver, and provides for the natural development of phonetic structures in the individual. Cites evidence and function of this specialization and architectural relations between the two classes of modules. (Author/RT)

This paper describes the strategies used by an expert in communication as he analyzed conversations between an eight-year-old hearing-impaired girl and her teacher. Protocol analysis is used to identify a pattern in the analysis, beginning with social conventions and proceeding to discourse genre, sentences, and finally, individual words. (DB)