With a significant number of students using machine translation (MT) for academic purposes in recent years, language teachers can no longer ignore it in their classrooms. Although an increasing number of studies have reported its pedagogical benefits, studies have also revealed that language teachers are still sceptical about using MT for various…

The proficiency in vernacular has long been a methodological ethos pervasive among field researchers and--despite new dynamics of fieldwork--still overshadows discussions related to collaboration with translators and interpreters, which are either marginalized or hidden within the category of a 'research assistant'. The purpose of this study is to…

Virtual intercultural communication is of great interest in intercultural research. How can a researcher gain access to this field of investigation if s/he does not or only partially speaks the languages used by the subjects? This study is an example of how categories relevant to research can be accessed through in-depth interviews. The interview…

Through two narrative inquiries, in this article I explore the challenges for qualitative researchers in working with multiple languages in capturing, translating, analyzing, and representing narratives. I discuss the effect on research when we engage in these processes considering what was happening as we translated both texts and experience from…

The purpose of this paper is to give evidence for the thesis that if teachers using a questionnaire as a data collection instrument have the questionnaire items translated from one language into another, they cannot assume that the translated items are valid simply because they were translated. Even if the original questionnaire items were…

An experiment in language behavior comparing two methods of learning grammatical word order in a new language presents scientific evidence supporting the use of pattern drills in foreign language teaching. The experiment reviews the performance of three groups attempting to learn small segments of Russian "microlanguage": (1) a drill group learned…

This publication consists of a collection of 18 papers in English, German, Swedish, and Finnish originally presented at a 1988 symposium of the Finnish Association of Applied Linguistics (AFinLA), which was organized jointly by the University of Vaasa and the Department of Teacher Education at Abo Akademi, Finland. Papers focus on the following…

Elicited imitation occurs in an experimental situation during which subjects are requested to repeat a model sentence constructed so as to include specific desired grammatical structures. Elicited translation involves giving subjects a sentence in one language, and asking them to say the same thing, but in another language; elicited translation…

A collection of 14 papers in contrastive linguistics includes: "Some Comments on Language Data in Contrastive Analysis" (Ruta Nagucka); "Contrastive Sociolinguistics Reconsidered" (Karol Janicki); "Variations in Polish Nasal /e/: A Contribution to the Development of Contrastive Sociolinguistic Methodology" (Jane…

Three methods for second language data collection are compared: free composition, picture description and translation. The comparison is based on percentage of errors in a grammatical category and in a source category. Most results obtained from the free compositions and picture descriptions tended to be similar. Greater variation was found for…

Describes a study comparing two methods of teaching English as a foreign language in France: a traditional and an audiovisual method. The research methodology is described in detail. The central question is not which method is better, but who benefits most from the method used. (AMH)

Tested the hypothesis that individual differences in immediate-verbal-memory span predict success in second-language vocabulary acquisition. In the two-session study, adult subjects learned 56 English-Finnish translations. Tested one week later, subjects were less likely to remember those words they had difficulty learning, even though they had…

A study analyzing word characteristics that make them more easily translated from English to French (or vice versa) indicates that translation efficacy is most strongly influenced by the frequency of the word in the language, its familiarity, and the similarity of the French equivalent to the English word. (Author/CB)

Investigated the independent and interactive effects of contextual and definitional information on vocabulary learning. German students of English received either a text with unfamiliar English words or their monolingual English dictionary entries. A third group received both. Information about word context is crucial to understanding meaning. (44…

A review of literature on technology and second language (L2) instruction focused on the use of seven different technologies: television/videotapes/tape recordings; hand computers; computer conferencing; electronic mail (e-mail); multimedia and hypermedia; computer-assisted language learning; and machine translation. A secondary purpose of the…