In general, ESP textbooks tend to reflect methodological trends, educational fashions and changing contents. Undeniably, their quality has increased in the last 15 years and they tend to cater for most students' needs regardless of the pupils' field of study. However, those related to English teaching and learning for tourism studies do not…

Describes some experiments conducted among adult learners in France, West Germany, and Sweden to determine the accuracy of students' self-evaluations, measured against teachers' evaluations. Analyzes the results, showing that there is enough agreement between students' and teachers' assessments to justify increased reliance on self-evaluation.…

This study investigated the interrater reliability of proficiency-level judgments of graduate student trainee raters on oral proficiency interviews (OPIs). Trainees' ratings were compared with the judgments of a certified American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) tester for 150 interviews. (Author/JL)

This autobiographical analysis compares the learning of Mandarin Chinese over 15 years and Samoan over 20 years using an auto-communal model of learning--self instruction within a local community were creating encounters and making up conversations for the sake of language practice are the central learning method. (Author/VWL)

Compares writing samples by K-2 students and highlights the importance of developing better strategies for helping English-as-a-Second-or Other-Language (ESOL) teachers meet the instructional needs of young English language learners. (Author/VWL)

Describes a qualitative research project designed to explore the relationship between the study of a foreign language literary text and the development of competence in a second culture (C2). Compared the attitudes and performances of students who read a fact sheet about Cote d'Ivoire to students who studied a poem about Cote d'Ivoire. Students…

Reports on a study of the classroom acquisition of German word order by adult learners. Results of the study support the claim that classroom and naturalistic second language acquisition of complex grammatical features such as word order follow similar routes. (50 references) (Author/OD)

Compared two methods for correcting transfer errors in the foreign language classroom. Eight commonly encountered English-to-French transfer errors were identified and randomly assigned to one or two teaching conditions for one class section; each error was assigned to the opposite condition for the other section. (29 references) (VWL)

Compares the lexical proficiency of 69 grade 6 immersion students with that of 22 native French-speaking peers, based on verb use and in 5 written compositions. Measures of lexical error, variety, specificity, and sophistication show clear differences between the two groups. (33 references) (Author/VWL)

Demonstrates the relevance of second language teaching by discussing the English progressive aspect. Suggestions are made for how the teaching of the progressive to beginners of English could be improved. (Author/VWL)

Compares holistic scoring of nonnative writing in English with multiple trait assessment and scoring. (JL)

Contrastive analysis has an important role to play in the contemporary second-language classroom. It will move more and more into a domain of analysis that will focus on the underlying conceptual systems of the native language and target language. (Contains 48 references.) (LB)

Study of the German attrition of two Turkish girls who returned to Turkey after residing in Germany found that attrition stages (slower speech and code-switching; lexical attrition; and basic grammar) were largely a mirror-image of a Turkish boy's acquisition of German while residing in Germany. (14 references) (Author/CB)

This study compared 112 younger and older adult monolingual English speakers and English/Spanish bilingual speakers on measures of auditory perception and memory span. The results revealed no age difference in auditory memory span in English but found that both older and younger bilinguals performed better than monolinguals on these tasks.…

This paper examined the assessment of second-language proficiency in 157 research articles published in 5 language journals from 1988 through 1992, finding 4 major conventions for the assessment of language proficiency: (1) impressionistic judgment; (2) institutional status; (3) in-house measures; and (4) standardized test scores. (64 references)…