The development of English syntactic maturity was investigated among Chinese secondary school students learning English as a second language. Narrative and expository compositions written by 60 students at three grade levels were analyzed for increases in T-unit length, clause length, number of clauses per T-unit, and the use of nominals,…

Beyond the first several thousand most commonly used words in a language, direct vocabulary instruction is not efficient. Use of inferential skills then becomes the most effective way of learning new vocabulary; it is the way native speakers build their 60,000 word vocabularies. Because the skill is not automatically transferable, it must be…

Urges the combination of grammatical instruction with pragmatic spoken usage in the teaching of language. (LG)

To increase enrollments in Chinese courses, it should be explained that Chinese is relatively easy to learn. The following should be pointed out: (1) there is no conjugation of verbs, (2) there are no suffixes and derivations, (3) the syntax is simpler, (4) the characters are no more difficult than English spelling. (RM)

The distribution and form of negatives in Japanese as compared to English in the simple declarative sentence, in the interrogative sentence, in different speech styles, in indefinite negatives, and in complex sentences. (SC)

A course in introductory Greek was introduced as part of a freshman seminar program at William Patterson College of New Jersey. The course was distinctive in that the instructor undertook to learn the subject along with the students. The goal of the course was that the students would learn something about Greek, about language in general and about…

The author considers controversial psycholinguistic problems in the study of first and second language acquisition, raising such questions as whether all children learn language in the same way, and whether all languages are learned in the same way. Her observations, based partially on observing her own bilingual child, suggest that the cenematic…

Discusses the various problems arising in teaching the German pronoun (and expletive) "es" ("it") to Rumanians. There is no universally usable correspondence to "es" in Rumanian, where it is sometimes lacking, with the subject absent in either the deep structure or the surface structure. (IFS/WGA)

The premise that diglossamania, which is a pressure for second language learners to produce in English the equivalent style of the mother tongue, and which in turn leads to an artificial style, is discussed. (HP)

Discusses the importance of two Firthian themes for language teaching. The first theme, "Restricted Languages," concerns the "microlanguages" of every language (e.g., literary language, scientific, etc.). The second theme, "Collocation," shows that equivalent words in two languages rarely have the same position in…

This article considers two specific problems which arise when seeking equivalent sentences in French and in English, that of the articles and of the forms of the verbs. Without determining the internal asymmetry of the two languages, the language learner will have a highly inaccurate picture of so-called equivalents. (CFM)

Discusses the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the contraction of prepositions and determiners in German to emphasize that the communicative function of certain syntactic forms can only be understood, and should therefore only be taught, within the framework of contextual analysis. (CB)

A review of Hunt's research to find ways of measuring the growth of syntactic proficiency in American school children explores the possibilities of applying these measures to groups of British native and non-native speakers of English and developing them for use in teaching and testing. (Author/CB)

Uses a quantified version of a syntactic acquisition hierarchy to compare syntactic development in second language learners to that of other components of grammar, particularly inflectional morphology. (CB)