An historical overview of research on second language acquisition considers research topics examined in observational/longitudinal studies and experimental studies. The questions that have reappeared across both observational and experimental studies concern: (1) whether second language learning is the same or different from first language…

A SERIES OF SEVEN EXPERIMENTS TESTED THE RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING FOUR TYPES OF LANGUAGE LABORATORY EQUIPMENT FEATURING INACTIVATED OR ACTIVATED FEEDBACK (IF OR AF) OR LONG OR SHORT DELAY PLAYBACK (LD OR SD) IN LEARNING TO PRONOUNCE FRENCH. AFTER PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENTATION, THREE REPLICATION EXPERIMENTS WERE CONDUCTED WITH PAID JUNIOR…

This is the first in a series of articles on general phonetic characteristics of American English. Language research techniques of spectrographic analysis, spectrographic synthesis, articulatory motion-picture study, and statistical calculation are briefly described. Thirty-five areas of phonetic difference for comparison of English to Spanish,…

This selective bibliography lists 16 books and 42 journal articles dealing with German-English contrastive studies. The entries range in data from 1952 to 1972 with the majority published since 1965. The books cited are German or American publications and the articles appeared in well-known European or American pedagogical language journals. (TL)

This selective bibliography lists 8 books and articles dealing with Russian-English contrastive studies and 2 articles on general Slavic studies. The entries range in date from 1953 to 1967. The books cited are European or American publications and the articles appeared in well-known European or American pedagogical language journals. (TL)

The Oral Language Program is a set of instructional materials in English as a second language for children aged five to seven. It is also an instructional system; in addition to 150 lessons for the children, there are pupil assessment devices, teacher training procedures and materials, program evaluation procedures, and installation and monitoring…

This paper presents some thoughts on teaching listening and speaking skills in second language learning. Both teacher and student roles are discussed along with learning devices. Teacher and student share active and productive roles in the development of listening and speaking skills; the breadth of each of their roles encompass both self-analysis…

The College Entrance Examination Board Foreign Language Placement Tests were normed on students enrolled in French, German, Russian, and Spanish courses during Fall semester, 1969. Differences between performance at the four levels of each course were also investigated and comparisons made among CEEB test scores, course grades, and CEEB standard…

Comparison of the performance of Japanese college students (N=10) on a cloze test and a test using comic strips to assess English as a second language acculturation revealed that the comics were as effective and reliable as the cloze test and that the comics' attractiveness appeared to activate students' minds. (CB)

Explores cloze sensitivity to global comprehension by means of retrospective interview techniques. No significant differences were found between English as a second language (ESL) college students (N=14) and native English-speaking students (N=14) in their processing strategies. (Author/CB)

A comparison of language skill development by college students enrolled in a content course taught in French and in a French language course found that content-course students excelled in oral skills and language attitudes and that language-course students excelled in writing skills, challenging conventional assumptions about language-learning…

To many Chinese students, learning the words such as "make" and "do" seems a piece of cake, yet learning how to use them appropriately is anther case. This paper aims to investigate Chinese learners' use of the verbs "make" and "do", two major representatives of high-frequency words from the perspective of…

A number of issues in classroom second language instruction, particularly as they relate to grammar instruction, are considered in the context of recent research and theory. Discussion begins with a review of the nature and role of second language grammar instruction. Following this, these issues are explored: whether the native or target language…

An experiment in Japan investigated the kind of input that is effective in enabling college-level students of English as a Second Language to formulate grammar, specifically prepositional and phrasal verbs. A grammaticality judgment test and a translation test were given to 131 Japanese university students, who were divided into three treatment…

This study is an examination of the test results of 90 academically oriented adult participants on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Canadian Language Benchmarks Assessment (CBLA), to determine the comparability of performance on the two tests and the possibility of using two tests in the academic admissions process for…