This work is intended to find replies to practical questions, such as how well native speakers of Spanish are decoded by native speakers of English, which errors interfere with decoding by the listener, and what the implications of the study might be for teaching. Fifteen Chileans were asked to tell stories in English, and several panels of native…

For many years (1995-2002), the Department of English of the University of Blida witnessed low rates of academic achievement of students preparing an English Degree. An analysis of the second year students' course grades in academic years 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 and data from a preliminary survey with some teachers reflected signs that the…

The question of how a scientific researcher copes with a text written in a language which he or she does not adequately understand is examined in this Dutch language study of Dutch preservice engineers. Although French, German, and English are traditionally taught in secondary schools in the Netherlands, French gives Dutch engineers the most…

This paper reports on an experiment designed to determine whether a novice second-language (L2) reader can be characterized as concept-oriented or syntactic-structure oriented. The operating premise was that high school L2 students read and understand not so much by translating as by combining conceptual fragments into a tentative "script," which…

This report describes a program for improving listening skills, lack of which interferes with second language acquisition. The targeted population was first- and second-year Spanish students in one middle school and one high school. Intervention over 15 weeks included changes in the classroom environment (desk arrangement, improved lighting,…

Teachers of English as a second language need classroom communication activities to help students develop communicative competence. A procedure which uses a group-learning approach and which ensures real communication is the "Strip Story," an adaptation of scrambled story exercises in which each student is given one sentence of a story…

The questions investigated in this study concern the adequacy of the current comprehensive English as a Second Language (ESL) programs, the need for a separate but complementary reading program, the relative merits of a classroom-based or an independent reading laboratory method, and the relationship between native language reading proficiency and…