This volume presents a systematic approach to developing advanced English language competence at tertiary level. It includes the reflections of experienced language teachers and teacher-researchers in the English Language Competence programme at the University of Vienna and provides examples of good practice, amalgamating teaching expertise and…

This article proposes improving the use of the language lab in second language teaching by increasing the importance of actual spoken language in relation to structural exercises, which may be of an artificial nature. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Language laboratories are especially neglected at the intermediate and advanced levels of foreign language learning. Teachers fail to avail themselves of an important teaching tool at a critical point, when the more mechanical aspects of assimilating the target language should give way to gaining an actual communicative competence in it. At the…

Discusses the language laboratory as a means of developing practical abilities in a foreign language. Two topics are treated specifically: (1) the laboratory from a technical and theoretical perspective, and (2) an analysis of the language skills most effectively trained through use of the language laboratory. (AMH)

This paper presents a "natural" method of second language learning which stresses contact with native speakers and de-emphasizes textbook learning. The method described here is that used by Baptist missions in eastern Africa to teach Bemba, but is transferrable to any language. Some of the main principles of the method are: (1) language…

This paper presents arguments in favor of using partial dictation as a test of foreign language proficiency. In this kind of test, subjects listen to recordings of material in the foreign language and are required to fill in missing words in a written version of the recordings. Partial dictation is preferable to ordinary dictation in that: (1) it…

Implying the need for a reexamination of the theoretical bases for second language learning in the secondary school environment, this final report of a 2-year experiment, funded by the U.S. Office of Education and conducted in public secondary schools of Pennsylvania, involved 1,090 students of French or German in 1965-66 and almost 700 in…

From the beginning, a major preoccupation of the business English course described here has been to respond to students' needs concerning programs of study as well as their future professional needs. Accordingly, these principles basic to all teaching procedures were adopted: (1) the material being learned must be put into practice; (2) such…