The proceedings of the fourth colloquium of the Groupe de recherche en didartique des langues (Language Teaching Research Group) include eleven papers and four synopses. The papers, three in English (E) and the rest in French (F), cover these topics: cognitive presence in language teaching/learning (F); interlanguage and metalanguage (F);…

The reward structure of a classroom refers to the means by which a teacher motivates students to perform school tasks. This document reports on a study in which academic achievement in competitive and reward-structured environments was examined in two high school sophomore level biology classes of equal academic ability. Each class was pretested…

Case study observations and analyses of learning styles in U.S. secondary schools comprise the crux of this monograph. The text provides testimony to the accomplishments of schools actually integrating differentiated learning styles into their diverse educational programs and concomitant coursework. With the notion that learning style provides…

Free recall and cued recognition performance were studied in 53 field independent and 55 field dependent undergraduate education majors who were with or without structure at the time of learning and at the time of recall. Results indicated that field dependent learners recalled more of the textual material when provided with structure during both…

A 3 x 3 x 2 factorial design was used with 120 undergraduate subjects to study the effects of question type on learning from prose. A 2,000-word reading passage on geological history was presented, with factual questions on each page. Questions were also presented after the reading activity. When compared to a reading only control group, the short…

In two different studies the relationships between study time patterns, retrieval time patterns, and clustering were examined. In the first study middle Socioeconomic Status white students in grades 2 through 5 increased their use of the clustering strategy as a function of the organizational nature of the list. List composition facilitated…

Case studies involving learning styles and strategies in English as a second language are examined, based on previous research in which two English pilot tests were administered to a sample of Finnish University students. Those who scored high and low on the two tests were selected for structured interviews, where attention was directed to…

Recent brain research demonstrates that the left hemisphere of the brain processes information in a linear, organized way. The right hemisphere processes the same information as a whole, with a focus on nonverbal, spatial components. Current educational practice is inordinately skewed to develop only the left hemisphere of the brain. Data from…

The decoding behavior of Cindy, a junior high school student of French, was analyzed. An examination of a transcript of her attempt to translate a French passage aloud into English revealed that she was not taking advantage of contextual guessing. During remedial sessions, an attempt was made to discover the best method of helping Cindy acquire…

The paper discusses the use of music-based experiments to illuminate teachers' understanding of their own and pupils' informal ways of learning. The major objective of the paper is to help teachers understand students' learning processes. Because one central problem in academic research is that of finding the right questions, researchers should…

The adequacy of Rosenberg's classification scheme, in which he divides children's learning characteristics into four styles, was investigated. Middle school students (N=377) were used as a sample, and their behavior was assessed by 30 teachers using the Learning Style Checklist. After intercorrelations of the 40 Checklist items were obtained, the…

After reading a passage from a text which explained the deep and surface approaches to learning, ninety Swedish teenagers and adults with varying levels of formal education were asked to discuss their own learning in terms of this distinction. Surprisingly, sixty-one subjects considered both approaches applicable to their own learning. After…

This paper discusses a series of interdependent projects designed to further define the covert processes involved in utilizing cognitive skills, as well as the procedures necessary to train an individual in their use. In an early project designed to ascertain the types of strategies used by learners in an academic or training environment,…

Reports on students' study and drawing of five electronic circuit diagrams. Concludes that the success of the students depended upon the amount of detail in the instructional diagrams. (RT)

Describes the study of learning strategies employed by successful (defined in terms of oral communicative abilities) Chinese learners of English. These strategies are compared to those of less successful learners and those of other population types from other studies. The test of oral communicative abilities is described. A strategies…