This study investigated complimenting behavior in three language varieties, British English, Finnish, and the interlanguage of Finish Learners of English. It found that compliments in Finnish tended to be longer and more syntactic than in English and that Finnish learners of English demonstrated appropriate complimenting behavior in English,…

This collection of six essays and one bibliography on second language learning includes: (1) "Transfer in Relation to Some Other Variables in L2-Learning" (Hakan Ringbom); (2) "Word Frequencies in Finnish and Finland-Swedish Learner Language" (Hakan Ringbom); (3) "The Influence of Swedish on the English of Finnish…

This paper discusses the interlanguage conversation as a process in an institutional setting. The interaction type in question is language proficiency interview and the material discussed is a series of interviews of French second language learners whose mother tongue is either Finnish or Swedish. These interviews are compared to non-evaluative…

The alternating and mixed use of Swedish and Finnish and special trade slang in three relatively small firms (employing a total of 678 employees, 40 percent of whom were Swedish-speaking, 56 percent Finnish-speaking, and 4 percent bilingual) in the bilingual city of Vasa, Finland was analyzed. (CB)

A study tested hypotheses concerning thinking in a foreign language. Specifically, it looked at whether (1) inferencing in a foreign language relies on mental models and propositional thinking; (2) the three stages of the theory of comprehension apply to understanding foreign-language discourse; and (3) propositional thinking manifests native…

A study of the effects of learning Swedish as a third language on the previously-learned English of native Finnish-speaking students examined 10,000 English-language school-leaving examinations of Finnish students for possible examples of Swedish influence in vocabulary, grammar, and word order. The examinations were those graded by a native…

A case study investigated the emergence of language and language concepts in a bilingual child, a girl aged 16 months to 6 years, 7 months. Observations were made by the child's parents and relatives in the child's home where the mother spoke Finnish and the father English. The report summarizes developments in phonology, morphology, word-level…

A study of the interlanguage of bilinguals and multilinguals compared the oral French proficiency of 20 native Swedish-speaking and 20 Finnish-speaking university students as evidenced in error patterns in oral tests. With the exception of phonological and phonetic errors in pronunciation, errors were classified by word class (article, noun,…

Gives a summary of the theoretical approaches to the role of phonetics and phonology in language learning and teaching as developed by the Finnish-English cross-language project at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Analysis was extended over the chains of connected speech to deal with all the phenomena that give rhythm in speech. (Author/VWL)

The papers included in this yearbook of the Finnish Society of Applied Linguistics (AFinLA) were presented at the 1998 AFinLA conference "Linguistics and Finland: Crossing the Gulf." Papers are in Finnish, Estonian, or English, but all have accompanying English abstracts. The topics discussed in the papers include the following: speed…