The apparent difficulty of students of French as a second language to acquire French vocabulary is examined, drawing on experience with teaching Irish university students and the structures and stylistic traits peculiar to French. It is noted that while certain kinds of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) occupy little space in text, they take…

Describes an assignment designed to dispel prospective English teachers' dichotomous ideas about language ("right" or "wrong"); gain a sense that more than one dialect could be accepted; and understand that the variations from the handbook rules ("errors") might even be rhetorically based. (TB)

A recently developed primary school German immersion program for a German community is described and its development from Canadian examples is discussed. The program is a composite of immersion, bilingual, and second language models. Early reaction is highly favorable, although the program will not be fully evaluated for a few years. (MSE)

A questionnaire used to elicit from university students their uses for, attitudes about, and problem areas in French vocabulary learning is presented and discussed. In the questionnaire, a series of brief lexical exercises tests understanding of word similarities and commonalities, lexical functions, registers, antonyms, paraphrasing,…