This is the first phonetics book to be developed for use in first-year French courses. The intent of the book is to help the student acquire confidence in his ability to look at 85 percent of the words in the French dictionary and be able to pronounce those words correctly, as a result of his sounding out the words. When an American student looks…

This paper describes and explains a classroom exercise in French translation, with a view to promoting translation as an integral part of language instruction, particularly at the third-year college level when the student can be expected to have acquired an advanced knowledge of the parts of speech, of the grammatical distribution and their…

When the author's family spent a year in Germany, two of the children attended German schools, where they were forced to learn German for all communication. On the basis of that experience, it is suggested that classrooms employ situations similar to total immersion in language teaching. Teaching and learning for communication depend on three…

This paper reports on an experiment carried out by the Chinese language program at Oberlin College to use play production as a means of teaching spoken Chinese. The experiment was inspired by the fact that teaching spoken Chinese cannot be solved by traditional classroom methods, particularly at the intermediate level. The lack of texts, the…

This Middlebury College summer 1974 commencement address is an informal presentation of the author's experiences as a language learner. The effectiveness of such pedagogical methods as the grammar-translation, audio-lingual, and "balanced" approaches, and of language learning with the aid of an informant, is discussed. It is concluded that, given…

This paper suggests that language teachers reconsider their approach to listening comprehension, as recent studies seem to indicate that listening is not a passive but a highly active skill. The importance of listening comprehension as an independent skill is stressed in the first section, and principles of speech processing from which the…

Videotapes were used to determine disruptive versus relevant student behavior exhibited (1) with teachers trained under the Oral Language Program (OLP) implemented by the Southwest Cooperative Educational Laboratory and (2) with non-OLP teachers. Five categories of disruptive behaviors--gross motor, noise making, verbalization, orienting, and…

Arguing that slot-cards teach the structure of the verb and the grammatical message each slot carries while reducing the number of forms to be learned, the author describes a technique for teaching the tense modes of the present indicative, the present subjunctive, and the perfect indicative in French. A working model of the verb stems "aimer" and…

During the year 1972-73 experiments were conducted at the University of Brussels on the use of motion picture films as a medium of teaching English as a foreign language to college students. Most of the students were at the intermediate level in English, and needed practice in aural comprehension and oral expression. Selected films were obtained…

This learning module is designed to provide the student with insights into the nature and goals of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and the means to achieve these goals by enabling him to: (a) explain accurately the rationale for each component of TESOL, (b) justify the teaching of English as a second language through a…

This learning module is designed to provide the student with an introduction to the relevance of psychology for second-language teaching and its practical classroom applications and to enable him to: (a) define concisely cognitive and behaviorist theories, (b) identify the effects of the cognitive and behaviorist theories in a series of…

A word of caution is needed about the tendency of language teachers to seize on simplistic and unproven solutions to complex problems. For example, the concept of individualization, when it is limited to having students work in isolation to fulfill mechanically-prescribed objectives, should be questioned. The so-called "systems approach" to…

This programed textbook uses drawings of objects and people as it introduces basic vocabulary and grammatical patterns for the student of English as a second language. The 149 steps in the book progress through a variety of patterns including negatives, questions, and commands. Present and present progressive action verbs are included. Forms of…

This book contains a number of games and activities intended for children aged 8-12 who are learning French as a second language. The games allow for practice of sentence patterns, structures, and vocabulary common to many French courses taught in England, particularly those introduced in Stages 1A and 1B of "En Avant," the "Nuffield Introductory…

Discussion of the current student malaise toward foreign literature and reading problems encountered by college students is directed toward means of making college language programs more relevant and of updating teaching methods. Student disinterest is traced to a premature and excessive overexposure to electronic media. The author proposes a…