The dislocation of sentence elements in spoken French is seen as allowing the speaker to free himself from certain constraints imposed on word order, position of accents, and grammar. Dislocation is described, its various functions are enumerated, and implications for second language instruction are outlined. (MSE)

Suggests that second language learners could benefit from being made aware of the semantic components that unify verbs that display a certain syntactic behavior and the semantic components that exclude other verbs from participating in this behavior. Findings of a study in which production and judgment data on the behavior of "change of state" and…

Test results for final-year French students in Canadian universities show they have not mastered the gender of some of the most frequent French nouns. Two recommendations are to continue to seek simplification of the learning of gender and to require students to use the full range of syntactic transformations. (MSE)

The conciseness and "ease of use" often attributed to North American English relative to French in standard contemporary usage is explained in terms of English morpho-syntactic structure and of the values of the classical norm and rhetoric affecting French. (Author/MSE)

Analysis of language production skills of French immersion students in grades 1-6 over 3 years revealed rapid growth of oral competence in the first three years of acquisition, followed by a much slower annual rate of progress. Lexical and syntactic structures most difficult to acquire emerge in five distinct patterns. (50 references) (Author/MSE)

Suggests that the activity of retelling a story in a second language reveals a student's knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and sense of story. Describes a story-telling activity with students in Spanish, levels three-five, and notes a strong relationship between language proficiency and years of study. (SED)

A study examined effects of requiring mainly nonfrancophone university freshmen to use word processing in a French literature course. Results showed students learned word processing without harmful effects on course performance, showed greater control over French spelling and grammar, and wrote more syntactically complex French. Increased…

This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…