It is proposed that the concepts of location and goal are helpful instructional tools in Russian, encouraging competence and discouraging incorrect analyses of sentence structure. Minor reorganization of conventional instructional materials and addition of a few sentences for discussion would be of significant assistance in student understanding.…

An analysis of the use of attenuation (structural or semantic softening of the speech act) and sentence structure in elicited speech acts by normally developing, learning disabled, and developmentally delayed populations is presented. In the normally developing population (1) the development of attenuation strategies is different from structural…

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…

This study presents an analysis of the successive steps used by Italian-speaking secondary school students to acquire mastery of the relative pronoun in standard French. This structure was chosen for study because the acquisition of the French relative pronoun is a source of difficulty for Italian learners. An analysis was made of the students…

Proponents of the cognitive approach to language teaching list linguistic competence as the primary instructional objective and attribute considerable importance to listening comprehension. For the student, linguistic competence would be knowledge of grammatical components of the language and its vocabulary. Understanding oral messages is an…