Language testing and second language acquisition research are both concerned with proficiency in the second language; given this shared interest, the rapprochement between these two domains may prove revealing and productive not only in terms of teaching practices, but also in taking a wide view of language, ranging across cognition, society and…

The theme of this volume, complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as dimensions of second language production, proficiency and development, represents a thriving area of research that addresses two general questions that are at the heart of many studies in second language acquisition and applied linguistics: What makes a second language (L2)…

A model of speech perception and production is suggested here which attempts to account for different rates of acquisition of perceptual and productive skill in the second language without assuming the existence of two separate second language grammars. (Author/KM)

By age two, a child begins to form complex sentences by joining two or more sentences or by embedding one sentence into another. Formation of conjoined structures is a simpler process and emerges earlier than that of embedding structures. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Do children produce or understand embedding…

On the basis of the grammatical theory developed by Noam Chomsky, it is reasonable to presume that the different parts of a sentence may not all be understood with equal facility and speed. One purpose of this study was to determine whether some of the grammatical relations within a sentence were understood more readily than others. Sentences 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…

This book provides a discussion of rhetoric and its importance in second language learning in general, with specific remarks on problems in teaching English as a second language. Logic (not in the strictest philosophical sense), the basic rhetoric, is evolved out of a culture; it is not universal. Rhetoric is not universal either. Rhetorical…

For several years in Switzerland it had been clear that adolescents with previous learning difficulties in their own country experienced even greater academic problems in Switzerland where they were expected to attend school with native speakers of French. Therefore, an experimental class was organized of Spanish and Italian-speaking children who…