Current cross-sectional morpheme accuracy methodology whittles away the data until what remains in the final analysis is less interesting than what has been discarded. These methods of analysis obscure and eliminate variation in individual production of the morphemes under study and fail to reveal true systematicity in the data. Using data on…

Language development in disadvantaged children and the research related to this area are the subjects of this issue of the IRCD Bulletin. The first part discusses the functions of the various components of language and the effects of language deprivation on disadvantaged youngsters. The educational approaches to teaching language fundamentals…

Two small-scale studies of foreign language test validity are reviewed. The teacher variable is found to be the great threat to test validity, even when grammatical material is presented in the language laboratory. Suggestions for compensating for teacher influence are offered. (JB)

This research report is concerned with establishing a minimum vocabulary of English instruction for French students at the secondary level. The approach to the investigation is based on choosing vocabulary that corresponds to the current communication needs of the students, has functional content, and takes the spoken language into account. The…

The teacher of English as a second language can perform valuable language research in the classroom. Types of research include: natural language acquisition; small-scale pedagogical intervention; and large-scale methodology in long-range studies. Procedures for formulating research questions, hypotheses and design are outlined. (CHK)

This study focused on linguistic analyses used in the PIF Project (Project in Error Analysis, Interlanguage Studies and Contrastive Linguistics), an ongoing study of learner language and a project in foreign language pedagogy. For the project, 120 Danish learners of English were divided into 12 groups representing different Danish educational…

A pilot study is described which illustrates a methodology that can be used in determining the relative importance of different error types according to evaluations made by native speakers and presents preliminary results concerning the relative importance attached by native German teenagers to errors committed in German by English speakers. (SW)

This report presents detailed, nonevaluative descriptions of instructional methods used in a sample of outstanding language training centers. Together these 19 different training programs represent a student age range from subteen to adult. Included are both intensive and nonintensive, military and civilian, and governmental and nongovernmental…

This paper reports on a study undertaken to investigate the relationship between elicited imitation data and comprehension data, as measured by a picture-identification task and a second language (L2) to first language (L1) translation task, and between elicited imitation data and production data, as measured by a spontaneous production task and…

An operational definition of the standard for learner achievement at Level 2, with respect to the skills of reading and writing, was proposed for Spanish as one aspect of a research project. The method described, serving as the basis for articulation of level achievement, deals with general procedures, proposed operational definition of reading…

Limitations of language acquisition research are: the restricted linguistic scope of studies; lack of data in cognitive processes and learning strategies, the role of individual variables, second language acquisition, and the role of social and environmental variables; and undeveloped methodology for data collection and data analysis. (SCC)

Some theoretical definitions of attitudes, including various assumptions that underlie most approaches to attitude mesurement, are presented, and directions and findings of attitude research approaches to attitude measurement are the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, the semantic differential, and the Likert scale, each characterized by a particular…

Errors in second language learning are viewed as evidence of the learner's hypotheses and strategies about the new data. Error observation and analysis are important to the formulation of theories about language learning and the preparation of teaching materials. Learning a second language proceeds by a series of approximative reorganizations…

This report describes research into the effectiveness of the language laboratory in improving students' reading, listening and speaking skills in secondary school language programs. The experiment, involving some 5,000 students in 21 school districts of the Metropolitan School Study Council, was restricted to students of French. Student…

Questions the adequacy of the data gathered through error analysis procedures, the status of the interlanguage as an autonomous system and the value of descriptions based on error analysis for the language teacher and learner. Suggests that error analysis procedures may prove more useful for historical linguistics. Available from Instituut voor…