A study was designed to ascertain whether syntactic avoidance behavior could be demonstrated for two groups of ESL learners (native speakers of Arabic and of Spanish and Portuguese) in accordance with contrastive analysis difficulty predictions. An avoidance pattern was found in accordance with such predictions. (CHK)

Presents checklists of the more common grammatical patterns in spoken Mandarin for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students. Most of the patterns include an example with an English gloss. (Author/LMO)

Reviews the different categories of native pauses and describes techniques for incorporating them cautiously into the spoken French of anglophones (especially Americans), suggesting that proper pause behavior is actually a definite mark of authentic sounding and well-controlled speech. (Author/CB)

Reports the results of an experiment which tested the ability of native English-speaking students of Spanish and native Spanish speakers to comprehend an oral passage, in Spanish, and remember the word order of certain sentences. The findings indicate that word order significantly affected the degree of the English speakers' comprehension.…

This article discusses the influence of cultural factors on language, particularly in the area of lexicon, and is intended for students of Spanish as a second language. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Outlines a unit intended for self-instruction at the beginning level of French. The focus is on particular aspects of French culture. (CLK)

Pleads for proper consideration, in teaching French, of the continuing process of evolution of the language. Discusses, as an example of language change, the past participle construction in respect to distribution, morphology, and syntax. (IFS/WGA)

All the irregularities of all common French verbs are reduced to five categories in the "passe simple." This system facilitates learning the tense without memorizing each irregular verb independently. (PMJ)

This article describes an approach to second language teaching known as Threshold Level, specifically in its application to French instruction. The approach centers around functional language usage. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Presents findings from a sociolinguistic study of the language use and language attitudes of Hispanic families in a small community in upstate New York. Sought to identify and describe the familial linguistic patterns that are leading to an emerging population of US-born Spanish speakers by examining the factors that are related to Spanish…

Analysis of the performance of beginning American Sign Language students, who had only recently learned the manual alphabet, on a task in which proactive interference would build up rapidly on successive trials, supported the view that different languages have separate memory stores. (Author/CB)

Reports the findings of research on the acquisition of French intonation by native speakers of Canadian English and Japanese. Results show that cross-linguistic influence in intonation is of central importance to the learner's acquisition of the target system, and that one should not underestimate the degree of the complexity of that influence.…