A conversation with the author's 7-year-old son who is just beginning to learn French serves to illustrate the concept of communicative competence and its implications for second-language teaching and testing. Communicative competence is defined as the ability to engage in spontaneous, interpersonal transactions, in contrast to linguistic…

Linguistics can contribute to language education by making teachers empirically aware of the complexity of language, methodologically attuned to improved teaching techniques, and theoretically informed about the general nature of language. Past education projects which have been affected by the application of linguistic principles are Breakthrough…

A program designed to teach English as a second language is described in this paper. The primary objective of the program is to teach adult immigrants to discriminate and articulate English speech sounds so that they are able to participate in oral communication with the English-speaking community. Following a description of the program, the…

While most foreign language programs list communicative language use as a primary goal, classroom tests seldom reflect this objective but rather focus on discrete-point linguistic competence. The authors present a model of the communication process and point to the main task in constructing tests of communicative competence: devising simulated…

The meaning of a word often cannot be formulated by conscious rules, because it is unconscious. Evidence on the verb "break" demonstrates this. The consequence for teaching is that teachers cannot supply meanings in words, but should present a wide range of uses of a word, so that students can intuit the unconscious generalization. (Author)

Papers presented at the symposium of error analysis in Lund, Sweden, in September 1972, approach error analysis specifically in its relation to foreign language teaching and second language learning. Error analysis is defined as having three major aspects: (1) the description of the errors, (2) the explanation of errors by means of contrastive…

Prior to the development of modern sociolinguistics the immediate contribution of linguistics to society as a whole was negligible. Without the further development of sociolinguistics, the situation will not change radically. In order to arrive at a more useful system of linguistics, linguists must realize that this situation does not result…

One of the several causal mechanisms for errors made by adult second language learners is interference from the native language. This paper attempts to account for the cognitive nature of interference by proposing two psycholinguistically based principles that will explain various types of production and perception errors made of second language…

The prenominal relative modifer construction (PREM) in German, while not a compulsory grammatical feature of the language, is a stylistic means of expression which native speakers use readily in non-casual speech and writing. Teaching the active use of this construction at the intermediate level of German study may be an effective means of helping…

Three papers intended as preliminary studies to bilingual professional curriculum development are included. "Speech Acts and Discourse Analysis," by Terry McCoy, represents an introduction to discourse analysis as a tool for the language teacher. The notion of a typology of speech acts is set forth, and models of discourse analysis by…

This study asserts that international university students need a reading program which stresses (1) the student's understanding of and adaptation to the political, social, and economic forces of the United States and (2) the development of communication skills in standard American English. In developing a program of competency-based instruction…

This paper attempts to characterize what seem to be key movements in the teaching of EFL at various levels in Europe. These movements reveal that semantic approaches to language teaching are widespread. Recent research into the effectiveness of teaching methods has demonstrated how difficult it is to show whether audiolingual or cognitive code…

The language teacher must provide a variety of activities in the classroom in which the student can use the second language in unrehearsed, novel situations requiring, on his part, inventiveness, resourcefulness and self-assurance. There should be less emphasis on linguistic accuracy and more on truly spontaneous and creative language. In the…

In a recent paper (1977) Levenston and Blum suggested that lexical simplification operates according to universal principles, and that these derive from the individual's semantic competence in his mother tongue. This paper examines the validity of this suggestion by means of a comparative study of lexical simplification in three different…

This paper discusses three linguistic theories related to communicative competence and English for special purposes in terms of the needs of post-graduate students in Guyarti, India. First, Hymes' theory of communicative competence is understood to be advocating a wider concept of competence than Chomsky's theory. Hymes states that a normal child…