Foreign language students often find themselves unable to produce appropriate responses in certain social situations. A contributing factor is that until recently, linguists and foreign language educators have concentrated on the student's acquisition of language (phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon), and have not concerned themselves with…

Reports a study wherein a foreign language aptitude test was used to group German students beginning English language instruction in three types of German intermediate schools. Students were tested periodically to determine if the groups originally established were maintained. By the end of the second year, they were not. (PMJ)

Presents the results of three studies that support the hypothesis that there are two types of proficiency in second language learning, "compartmentalized control" and "integrated control." Relevance to the Monitor Model and a method of teaching for integration are discussed. (Author/AM)

This study focuses on the consequences of immersion experience as a means of developing second language skills. The students involved are 13 to 14 years of age, finishing grade 7 in the public school system. Two forms of immersion are compared, "early" and "late." Early immersion means that students had followed an immersion…

The report describes an analysis of errors yielded by a written test in English given to 424 Swedish 14-year-olds from 24 different classes in the comprehensive school. The analysis discusses the difference in attainment between pupils of high and low proficiency, frequencies and types of errors for regular and irregular verbs, and the occurrence…

This report from the Comptroller General to Congress is designed to assess the effectiveness of the Bilingual Education Program and to suggest ways to improve its administration. The program as originally conceived is described, and funding, participation, and recent legislative developments affecting bilingual education are discussed. It is…

This paper presents and illustrates a technique for analyzing the communicative effect of errors produced in spoken and written communication samples by students of English as a second language (ESL). First, a method is demonstrated for eliciting a representative communication sample of a student's speech or writing, using pictorial stimuli.…

Discusses a research project carried out in Germany to compare the English proficiency of secondary students who had begun studying English in the third form (eight years old) with those who had begun in the fifth form (10-11 years old). (CFM)

Three groups of Grade 7 students participated in a study to examine the personality and language exposure factors associated with learning French as a second language. (CFM)

A study was conducted to examine the changes in students' attitudes, motivation and French achievement during a five-week, residential, summer program. Sixty-two students were administered a battery of attitude and motivation tests as well as a test of oral French proficiency prior to, and upon completion of, the course. (CFM)

The attitude and motivation of twenty-one Venezuelan students learning English at Boston University was assessed using two means: a controlled interview and a bilingual adaptation of the Gardner et al. 1974 Attitude Scales. Neither measure showed statistically significant correlations between positive attitude or strong motivation and progress in…

The school performance of pupils in grades 2-4 of the French immersion program in operation in the Ottawa-Carleton public schools is evaluated in comparison with the performance of those in the regular English program. The results indicate that by the end of grade 2, pupils in the immersion program show the same level of cognitive development as…

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of bilingual and monolingual school on the production of Spanish syntactic structures. The main hypothesis to be tested was that there was no significant difference in the development of Spanish syntactic structures between those children schooled bilingually and those children schooled…

The aim of the research in question was to investigate the efficiency of various classes of distractors used in multiple-choice vocabulary question testing. Much of the quality of multiple-choice questions relies on the extent to which incorrect choices tempt the less proficient student. The study selected 8 classes of distractors and attempted to…

This paper evaluates the pedagogic aspects of the Yugoslavian Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project. The project carried out a contrastive analysis of the phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical structures of English and Serbocroatian, and an error analysis in the use of English parts of speech and sentence parts. The investigation…