This study investigates why researchers have trouble determining when learners acquire inverted and statement forms of yes/no questions. Researchers have difficulty designing studies on this subject because this area of language is not fully rule-governed or systematic. The choice of the form may be based on two speakers' foreknowledge of each…

Describes a study done to identify those syntactic structures that effectively communicate ideas in written German composition of fourth-semester students. Also identified were grammatical structures that writers can control on a syntactic level, but which they do not employ as a communicative strategy. (Author/SED)

This study explored the dichotomy between global errors, that is, those violating rules of overall sentence structure, and local errors, that is, those violating rules within a particular constituent of a sentence, and the relationship of these to communication breakdown. The focus was tense continuity across clauses (TC) and subject-verb…

Papers from the 1973 Neuchatel Colloquium in Applied Linguistics are presented. Contents are as follows: "Karttunen's Types of Implication in English and German: A Contrastive Study," W. Abraham; "The Relevance of Generative Semantics for Language Teaching," R. Dirven; "'Be' plus 'ing' Revisited," H. Adamczeski; "The So-Called Deep Structures and…

The interlanguage hypothesis stresses that errors are a normal part of the language learning process. At the same time, in the view of many, the teacher has a responsibility to provide short cuts for the learner through appropriate corrective feedback. Conventionally, this has been taken to imply correction of expression by requiring repetition of…

This study presents an analysis of the successive steps used by Italian-speaking secondary school students to acquire mastery of the relative pronoun in standard French. This structure was chosen for study because the acquisition of the French relative pronoun is a source of difficulty for Italian learners. An analysis was made of the students…

This volume consists of three articles. "'Language and Society' in the B.A. Scheme," by L. M. O'Toole, is a revised version of some proposals for incorporating a "Language and Society" course in the second year of the B.A. program at the Language Centre. Ten propositions are offered as a basis for discussion. "Some Soviet…

Proponents of the cognitive approach to language teaching list linguistic competence as the primary instructional objective and attribute considerable importance to listening comprehension. For the student, linguistic competence would be knowledge of grammatical components of the language and its vocabulary. Understanding oral messages is an…