Reacts to Cook's (2001) essay on invented sentences, which argues that sentences such as "the philosopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen," have the valuable language teaching functions of providing useful language data for the student, promoting noticing and memorability, and allowing he teacher to create new sentences. (Author/VWL)

The author reacts to a critique of an earlier article he wrote on invented sentences in students learning English. (VWL)

Discusses an easily-learned pair of mnemonic devices that have universal applicability for the position of object pronouns in Spanish sentences. (Author/VWL)

Argues that the Guided Induction presentation is superior to a deductive one for the teaching of certain grammatical structures to beginning foreign language students. A study is presented that compared both approaches when applied to the learning of French grammatical structures by beginning level U.S. college students. (25 references) (GLR)

This concluding article in a series concerning the use of the comma in Spanish gives specific examples of its use from Spanish literature. Concluding remarks outline the major purposes of the comma. (NCR)

Discusses ways of teaching complementary pronouns in Spanish, includinq pronouns of direct objects, reflexive verbs, and indirect objects. (NCR)

Discusses the problems of Japanese students learning to read German; their two years of German at the university are inadequate. A "profile" of minimum reading competence is presented, followed by suggestions for teaching, including vocabulary, sentence structure, and types of text exercises. (IFS/WGA)

Examines sentence matching, a methodology frequently used in the second language literature to determine notions of grammaticality of nonnative speakers. Native speakers of French and second language learners of French performed a sentence-matching task focusing on three areas of French grammar: adverb placement, subject-verb agreement, and…

The task of teaching grammar in language courses is difficult because many American students lack a thorough grounding in the structure of their own language that could serve as a model framework for learning the grammar of another. It is helpful therefore for language teachers to stress parallel structures in the two languages, and to introduce…

This issue of "TESL Reporter" presents the following articles: "Language Acquisition and Dialectalism" by Patricia G. Adkins, "Supplementation of Opposites in Simple Predicate Expansion" by Yao Shen, and "Form Class Baseball: A TESL Game" by Alice C. Pack. The meaning today of dialectal speech, or "bidialectal speech," is addressed by Patricia…

The properties of "do", its distribution and meaning, are discussed. "Do" is one of the most common error-zones for Indian learners of English. Two analyses of "do" which account for the distribution and meaning of this element are presented. According to the transformational approach, "do" is introduced in…

Describes a sequence for teaching the Russian passive construction to exemplify how a learning sequence based on a contrastive analysis and on error analysis can lessen student errors. These errors are caused either by interference from the first language or over-generalization in the second language. (PMJ)

Presents a case study of a six-year-old Finnish girl who learned a foreign language by watching English language cartoons on video, without formal teaching or contact with native speakers. Topics addressed include television versus video; sentence structure; rate of speech; repetition; and learning by viewing versus naturalistic language learning.…

Quantitative analysis of 1,083 first language and second language academic texts establishes that advanced nonnative-English-speaking students in U.S. universities employ excessively simple syntactic and lexical constructions at median frequency rates significantly higher than those found in basic texts by native English speakers. (Author/VWL)

Describes a study done to identify those syntactic structures that effectively communicate ideas in written German composition of fourth-semester students. Also identified were grammatical structures that writers can control on a syntactic level, but which they do not employ as a communicative strategy. (Author/SED)