Practical difficulties in placing economics students and designing instructional materials in English as a Second Language at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), and techniques used for resolving these difficulties, are described. First-year students arrive with heterogeneous backgrounds because, unlike in other European countries, there is no…

A program to be used by teachers working with children at the stage of emergent writing, generally kindergarten and grades 1 and 2, and based on recognition of young children's development, is outlined. The project operates on the premise that children can independently learn to write by writing if they are immersed in the appropriate social and…

This study investigates the ways adult second language learners deal with errors and trouble sources in their conversations with one another. Specifically, it describes the repair work done by the second language learners, the extralinguistic features accompanying these repairs and the differences between repairs made by speakers at different…

This is a report on a child's English and French speech before, during and after a summer vacation in France. The findings are based on recorded samples of her speech in both languages elicited at three times: (1) immediately preceding the trip at age 3 years, 8 months; (2) 2 and l/2 months later; and (3) again 2 and l/2 months after her return to…

Errors can be considered concrete representations of stages through which one must go in order to acquire one's native language and a second language. It has been discovered that certain errors appear systematically, revealing an approximate system, or "interlanguage," behind the erroneous utterances. Present research in second language…

The influence of mother-tongue interference is examined on the basis of data from two tests at different levels of English proficiency: a commercial-college level, covering 4-5 years of English studies, involving a composition and translation test, and a preuniversity level, covering 7-8 years of English studies, with a multiple-choice test. A…

The case study examined the development of English writing skills in a native Russian-speaking college student with no previous instruction in English as a Second Language. It drew on writing samples from 2 years of English language instruction. Theories of first and second language acquisition, especially in written expression, are analyzed in…

Articles in this annual serial include the following: "Four decades with the Computer" (Winfred P. Lehmann); "The Uses of the Personal Computer in the Humanities" (James W. Marchand); "Digging in the Dictionary: Building a Relational Lexicon To Support Natural Language Processing Applications" (Martha Evans, Judith…

The assessment portfolio is a collection of materials and forms for testing and recording student progress at F.S. Key Elementary School, Arlington, Virginia. The materials are designed for use in an elementary school two-way partial immersion program. Introductory sections discuss the use of portfolios for monitoring student performance and…

This issue of an annual publication on second language teaching contains nine articles. All but one of the these is written in French; each paper, however, is preceded by an English-language abstract. The articles are as follows: "Des cultures, des pubs" ("Cultures, Advertising") (Sophie Bailly, Isabelle Tolle);…

Fourteen articles are presented in this volume on contrastive linguistics. The articles and authors are as follows: "A Brief Falsificationist Look at Contrastive Sociolinguistics" (K. Janicki); "The Locus of French Gender Control" (W. A. Bennett); "On the English Perfect Tense and Current Relevance Implicatures" (J.…

This journal includes current information for English teachers (new publications, resource materials, textbooks, tests, and trends) and these articles: "Reliability in the Oral Bagrut Test" (Raphael Gefen); "A Methodological Approach to 'Rewrite Sentence' Drills" (Eliyahu Galore); "Translation as a Bagrut Subject"…

The language learner is activated by exposure to primary linguistic data in the target language, categorizes that data and deduces from it a system of rules or hypotheses. When the language acquisition process is successful, as is virtually always the case in first language acquisition, the learner's rule system corresponds to that of the speech…

Causes of language fossilization and ways to overcome it are considered. Fossilization is the relatively permanent incorporation of incorrect linguistic forms into a person's second language competence. The discussion is focused on fossilization of incorrect syntactical rules, based on experiences with learners of English as a second language at…

The interlanguage hypothesis stresses that errors are a normal part of the language learning process. At the same time, in the view of many, the teacher has a responsibility to provide short cuts for the learner through appropriate corrective feedback. Conventionally, this has been taken to imply correction of expression by requiring repetition of…