A study of German-speaking learners of English as a Second Language observed students telling a story, in English, based on an eight-frame cartoon provided to them. The cartoon had a surprising conclusion whose understanding required careful observation early on, creating a cognitive stress affecting language processing. It was found that in…

Two case studies of the specific vocabulary learning strategies used by native Chinese-speakers learning English as a Second Language (ESL) at Beijing Normal University are presented and discussed. Subjects were two university students identified as "good" and "poor" language learners. They read two passages, one with about…

Second language educators need to examine in greater depth the learning processes of young children in order to provide them with the kind of teaching they need in order to really learn. This means searching other fields to learn as much as possible about: questioning strategies and the development of critical thinking skills; hemispheric…

A study investigated the process of learning French by Chinese students, as revealed by student errors in 48 compositions and 33 oral reports. Grammatical, or competency, errors were categorized by type and frequency. Analysis of the results shows the most frequent errors to be, in declining order of occurrence: in the use of articles; choice of…

The manual designed to accompany an orientation seminar for students concerning language learning processes and strategies and the design of their program includes materials for five sessions, in three sections. The first section covers language learning and acquisition in general and contains a survey of the participants' foreign language…

The value of language learning theory and research is discussed, and the need for content-related linguistic, sociolinguistic and cultural research, as well as treatment-related research on language teaching and learning, is emphasized. It has been only gradually, from about the mid-sixties and increasingly from the early seventies, that second…

The effect of language variation on language teaching is considered. It is suggested there has been a shift away from the notion that a language can be perceived by learners as a fixed system to an emphasis on its negotiability in a social context. This is not precisely the shift from grammatical concerns to functional ones, for it arises out of…

This book is designed to assist those who work with non-English dominant students by providing resource information relevant to second language teaching and learning. The articles in the series encompass both theory and practical learning techniques in six general topics. The articles in the first text of the series, concerning background and…

After a brief discussion of the concepts underlying the design of a high school district's composition program that emphasizes teacher inservice preparation and writing as process rather than product, this paper develops a theory of learning language skills similar to that used in learning a second language. A distinction is drawn between language…

Studies were conducted to help determine criteria for describing the stages through which second language learners pass as they acquire a new language. The ability of 24 beginning adult students of English as a second language to supply ten morphemes in obligatory contexts was predicted on the basis of contrastive analysis between English and each…

A multiple-choice test of English vocabulary and grammar was administered to college-bound Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking students studying English in Finland. Erroneous responses were analyzed to determine differences in learning strategies between the two groups. Swedish speakers were found to choose incorrect alternatives based on…

The language teaching method presented here is an inter-related set of techniques for teaching target comprehension skills directly to students on both university and high school levels. Three elements of the method are discussed: (1) the basics of a comprehension-based classroom; (2) the expanded speaking component; and (3) the expanded reading…

The foreign language instruction in the United States has followed a paradigm commonly called the "audio-lingual" method for almost twenty years. This paradigm is basically response-oriented and based upon structural linguistics and behavioral psychology. It focuses attention on speaking as the primary skill. It has not lived up to expectations.…

This article on language teaching methodology calls for the integration of change in language teaching with change in the teaching profession as a whole. Historically influenced by traditional definitions of specific linguistic domains such as that of lexicon and grammar, language teaching can progress only by adopting strategies that focus more…

The experiment reported on in this article is an attempt to cope satisfactorily with the problem of introducing writing in an elementary second language course. In the beginners' course set up at the C.R.A.P.E.L., the decision was made not to "introduce" the written language but to enable the learners, from the beginning of the course, to write…