A study examines the past-tense inflection process for native and non-native speakers of English. Subjects, ten native speakers of standard British English and ten proficient non-native speakers of English, were tested for responses to pseudo-irregular and -regular verbs according to their phonological distance (i.e., prototypicality) to known…

A good knowledge of English vocabulary is important for anyone who wants to use the language, so knowledge of vocabulary is often tested. A test may test one or all of the types of vocabulary (active spoken, active written, passive listening, and passive reading), but the test maker should be aware of the differences among the types and which is…

A study compared the narrative structures in stories told by monolingual Swedish-speaking children (n=19) and Finnish-speaking immersion students of Swedish (n=19), all in fifth grade. The immersion students had been taught in immersion since kindergarten. Subjects each told a story based on a wordless picture book, which was then analyzed for a…

The testing of 32,000 students in Australia and New Zealand participating in The Australian Language Certificates (ALC) provided the opportunity to examine students' attitude and learning preferences when studying a language other than English. The ALC offered the opportunity to learn seven languages in a Languages Other Than English (LOTE)…

This study investigated the extent to which various factors play a part in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students' ability to resolve pronoun-antecedent connections in reading. The subjects were 97 ESL learners with four different native languages (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish) enrolled in the University of Illinois's Intensive English…

An argument is made for continued and strengthened programs in foreign language instruction in business curricula. Among the points made are the following: economic and commercial development in post-World War II America established strong international ties; the Vietnam War emphasized U.S. inadequacies in cultural literacy; some higher education…

A large-scale statistical study of the predictors of language gain during study abroad is reported. Subjects were 658 American college and graduate students in the Soviet Union between spring 1984 and spring 1990. Variables examined included student characteristics (age, gender, citizenship, country of birth, place and levels of formal education,…

A study investigated common discourse features in the Spanish of six novice-level Spanish second language learners, as evidenced in oral interviews by two interviewers. Features examined included use of cohesive devices, use of the first language, whispering to self, scaffolding with the interviewer to express themselves, and negotiation. Results…

This study sought to address three questions related to the pronunciation of Spanish by non-native speakers: (1) does the pronunciation of upper-intermediate become "fossilized?"; (2) is their a relationship between quality of pronunciation and amount of improvement?; and (3) when judging degrees of "foreignness," are…

French teachers need to realize and convince their supervisors that more time must be given to development of acceptable pronunciation and comprehension skills in the initial stages of French language study. Phonetics offers the technique and tools for perfecting pronunciation. The method for college French instruction described is adapted from…

An attempt is made is this paper to examine the validity of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) scale through a comparison of the scaling of speaking tasks and speech performances by the scale and by a Rasch analysis of judgments made by "naive" persons. The results of the multi-faceted Rasch analysis seem…

One theory of second language acquisition argues that children's competence in a second language is a function of the amount of "comprehensible input" acquirers receive and understand, without formal instruction in reading or grammar. To examine this hypothesis, this study analyzes whether comprehensible input in the form of captioned television…

Research into language acquisition is reviewed and implications for practice are discussed. The research stemmed from the State of California's mandate to use specific oral language instruments for identifying students who are limited English speakers. The development of a test to identify and place English as a second language students in…

We assessed whether and how the discourse written for prototype integrated tasks (involving writing in response to print or audio source texts) field tested for the new TOEFL® differs from the discourse written for independent essays (i.e., the TOEFL essay). We selected 216 compositions written for 6 tasks by 36 examinees in a field…

Leaders in government and business are expressing a need for stronger programs in foreign language education that address national and state needs in defense, diplomacy, and commerce. The deterioration in foreign language capabilities in the United States results from declining participation in foreign language and cultural education. No concrete…