A study examines the relationship among the variables of practice, instruction and performance of adult learners of English as a second language. It is concluded that formal instruction is the most important determinant of student performance at intermediate and advanced levels because it provides a structural environment for feedback. (Author/RM)

The experiments discussed in this report are designed to explore the relationship between language and thought and implications for foreign language learning. Three basic issues are considered: whether or not thought and language are sufficiently distinct to require separate attention and planning as distinct factors in language teaching; the role…

One of the several causal mechanisms for errors made by adult second language learners is interference from the native language. This paper attempts to account for the cognitive nature of interference by proposing two psycholinguistically based principles that will explain various types of production and perception errors made of second language…

Studies are reported which attempt to discover the exact level of second language proficiency reached by students in second language immersion programs, with emphasis on analysis of error. (RM)

In an epilogue to the 1967 research report, "Transformational Sentence-Combining" (See ED 018 405.), John Mellon considers the significance of the sentence-combining experience and answers the charges of critics--Wayne O'Neil, James Moffett, and Francis Christensen--regarding his original research findings. Mellon points out, for example, that…

Recent research in experimental phonetics seems to provide evidence for a clear division between language units and speech units. Many researchers have suggested that the consonant-vowel (CV) syllable may be a universal unit of speech production and perception, while language units become criterial only at higher levels of processing. In second…

Most of what has been taught in the language classroom for a long while has been generally a reflection of the particular concept of language popular among linguistics at the time, but recently this trend has begun to break down. Recent texts are starting to be organized according to considerations besides linguistic criteria, for example,…

In language instruction, a dependable informational base of fact, experience, or judgment is essential if students are to develop a functional literacy. Yet the language information base in use today--the set of concepts about what language is, how it works, and how individual languages are maintained--has proven inadequate and unreliable. Reform,…

American and Canadian research is reviewed concerning the language needs of native primary students entering English schools from homes where a language other than English is spoken, and a study is reported that contrasted the language performance of children entering school from homes where only English is spoken and from homes where a language…

A young Spanish woman was given 82 hours of individual instruction in English. Her exposure to and use of English were confined to these lessons. The subject acquired adjective-noun ordering and regular plural relatively quickly; possessor-possessed ordering and genitive relatively slowly; the definite article all at once after a period of…

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…

Dissertation abstracts describing research on a wide variety of topics in bilingual education are presented. This publication is designed to provide background material for bilingual educators as well as practical procedures for bilingual teachers, administrators, counselors, and evaluators. The titles were acquired by using the two broad…

This is a report of a study conducted by a group of teachers to discover the extent to which students in the first three years of school were aware of the phonetic system of their native language (French) with emphasis on the means they used to analyze it. In the first year, the children discovered phonetic oppositions by touching their lips and…

Recent evaluations of the influence of linguistics on language teaching indicate that there is a growing gulf between the two fields. Linguistics failed to provide a sound theoretical foundation for language teaching; it did not alter the content of language teaching, nor did it successfully modify the attitudes of teachers. The parameters of the…

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…