This booklet describes the Urdu writing system, and is part of a series of teaching materials for teaching Urdu. A general introduction outlining the main characteristics of the system is followed by a presentation of the alphabet. Letters symbolizing the same sound are then discussed, followed by the vowels. Non-connectors, or letters not having…

This article describes discursive functions in the three major areas of non-literary written communication: (1) official or personal correspondence; (2) technical reading or editing; and (3) the press. Illocutionary acts are examined under their three aspects: graphic, lexical, enunciative. This description is intended to result in training…

The primary contact which many non-native speakers have with the English language is visual. Thus, there exist many competent readers of English who are ignorant of pronunciation. In the past, English pronunciation has been taught in a case-by-case fashion, without regard to principles relating orthography to pronunciation. This is a report on one…

An experiment was carried out to investigate errors in translation exercises done by French students studying English as a second language. A code was devised to rate errors as being: (1) lexical or grammatical, and (2) related to the signifier or the signified, with further subdivisions within these groups. While this method has the advantage…

An analysis of Kanji errors made by students of Japanese at International Christian University over a period of a year, as well as answers to a questionnaire on Kanji study, indicate that the learning of Kanji relies greatly on individual work outside of class. A method is presented which uses slides to enable students to study Kanji on their own.…

This article describes an attempt at organizing a continuing, self-instructional language program designed at the request of a commercial enterprise. The program was to be over a three-year period, and was originally aimed at producing reading comprehension in English, but at the request of the students the program was expanded to add listening…

The purpose of this paper is to classify the types of errors Arabs make with definiteness in English and to count the rate of occurrence of each. To accomplish this, 16 three-hour American history final examinations written by Arabic speakers at the University of Texas at Austin were examined. This discussion is limited to the four categories (out…

The ability of foreign students to read non-scientific material efficiently is important for rapid social and cultural integration. This report describes the reading comprehension section of a French language course aimed at foreign students at the Nancy Science Faculty. Exercises are presented which cover morpho-syntactic, communicative and…

For many teachers of reading comprehension, the establishment of communicative competence as the important criterion of analysis has brought about new and interesting insights into their work. But as more and more analyses of written texts refer to communicative analysis, it may be time to pause and think about what different people mean by…

Standard measures and techniques are needed to establish resemblances and differences among languages. A determination of the degree to which one lanquage or dialect differs from another requires the examination of language universals. To study what languages have in common, attention has to be given to the physical, psychological, and social…

This article on language teaching methodology calls for the integration of change in language teaching with change in the teaching profession as a whole. Historically influenced by traditional definitions of specific linguistic domains such as that of lexicon and grammar, language teaching can progress only by adopting strategies that focus more…

The experiment reported on in this article is an attempt to cope satisfactorily with the problem of introducing writing in an elementary second language course. In the beginners' course set up at the C.R.A.P.E.L., the decision was made not to "introduce" the written language but to enable the learners, from the beginning of the course, to write…

This study focuses on a native speaker of Chinese, in her 40's, who began to learn English in her late 20's when she emigrated to the United States. It was discovered that the subject was able to self-correct nearly every error she made in casual speech when the errors were pointed out to her after their commission. Furthermore, in nearly every…

This bibliography includes textbooks useful for the teaching of written skills in English as a second language to college and university students. The major emphasis of the texts listed is the teaching of writing but some contain material on reading as well. The first section contains only texts designed specifically for second language use. The…

The contrast between written language and oral language did not really begin to attract attention until second language teaching defined as its goal the acquisition of a communicative tool rather than a literary tool. This focus on communication made necessary the distinction between language used for oral communication and language used for…