The Saint Paul Public Schools' Project Early Kindergarten program aims to improve the school readiness of Saint Paul children. The program offers a rigorous academic approach and targets children who are English Language Learners, come from low-income families, or need Special Education services. Ultimately, the program intends to help close Saint…

This study compares pauses, repetitions and recasts in matched task interactions under face-to-face and computer-mediated conditions. Six first-year English undergraduates at a Turkish University took part in Skype-based voice chat with a native speaker and face-to-face with their instructor. Preliminary quantitative analysis of transcripts showed…

Subtitling or captioning the dialogues of English movies can be very helpful to EFL learners in the Arab world. The present study reviews the importance of subtitling for language learning in general and listening comprehension in particular. A comparison is made between different levels of listening comprehension and different genres of English…

The study investigates the effect of explicit contrastive analysis and translation activities on the incidental acquisition of single words and collocations. We compared three high school groups of learners of the same L1 and comparable L2 (English) proficiency. Each group represented one instructional condition: meaning focused instruction (MFI),…

The theme of this book cuts across disciplines. Contributors to this volume are specialized in education and especially classroom research as well as in linguistics, most being transdisciplinary themselves. Around 65 sub-Saharan languages figure in this volume as research objects: as means of instruction, in connection with teacher training,…

The role of explicit and implicit acquisition of grammatical rules in second language learning was examined by assessing high school students performance after several years of study on the correct use of the Spanish verbs "ser" and "estar". These two verbs are essentially equivalent in use to the English verb "to be," but there is a complex set…

The specific purpose of education is to "prepare" children so that they are able to maximise their potential and participate in the society or community around them. In order for many Third World nations to access information technology, the provision of language programs, particularly English, has become necessary. However, in the…

This report aims to characterize, in greater detail, the delicate psychological processes children go through when facing two languages and two cultures. In doing so, it is suggested that bilingualism can play an important role in cognitive and linguistic growth. Data used in this study is taken from a larger study involving 30 Italian bilingual…

Works on second language acquisition theories, affective variables and communicative competence, and interlanguage were compiled as a result of a symposium on universals of second language acquisition at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. The papers include: "On the Variability of Interlangauge Systems" (Elaine Tarone); "Memory, Learning, and…

Comments upon phonological, grammatical-syntactic, and lexical interference phenomena affecting the German learner of English, their causes and effects. Similarities between such phenomena in the two languages cause more difficulties than contrasts do. There is greater danger of under-differentiation than of over-differentiation. (Text is in…

A discussion of the role of transfer of native-language knowledge to second language learning proposes that language transfer is as much a sociolinguistic process as a psycholinguistic one. The term "sociolinguistics" is used in a broad sense to incorporate all social factors that affect language, both the relatively static characteristics of an…

The experimental research of two linguists studying the grammaticality judgments of second language learners, in which the researchers tried to find evidence that second language learners can discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences on principles of universal grammar, is examined and compared with the results of studies arguing…

A study of the processing of morphophonology by native speakers and second language learners focused on the processing of the Japanese potential suffix. The subjects were 13 Japanese adults (mean age 27.1) and 13 advanced learners of Japanese as a second language (mean age 26.6). The production of the potential inflection by the two subject groups…

A presentation, by way of texts and charts, of the French pronoun system, which owes its complexity to the fact of its derivation from Latin and to the persistence of the Latin heritage. Suggestions for use of the charts in language classes at all levels are given. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

The performance of multilingual subjects was contrasted to that of bilingual and monolingual subjects on two tasks that involved learning a miniature linguistic system. Results indicate that multilingual subjects have strategies that help them allocate processing resources more efficiently in formulating informal rules of limited scope under…