Ways in which the language laboratory may supplement classroom recitations of university students in the intermediate level of English as a foreign language at Bar Ilan University in Israel are presented here. The goal is to increase reading comprehension for bibliographies in students' major courses of study. (CHK)

Reading comprehension is an important means of increasing the learners' involvement. Texts should be used as stretches of real language rather than broken down into isolated units. In teaching foreign languages to non-language students, care should be taken in selecting, analyzing and presenting texts. (SC)

Describes a strategy for guessing meanings from context and suggests ways of practicing this strategy. The strategy involves four steps: (1) determining the part of speech of the word, (2) looking at the immediate grammar, (3) studying the wider context (usually the conjunction relationships), and (4) guessing the word and checking the guess.…

Outlines some applications of Natural Language Processing, the capacity of computers to process human language, to language teaching. The role of syntactic parsing (the assigning of grammatical structure to sentences by computer) and semantically based processing is examined. (Author/SED)

Describes research findings from a three-year curriculum research and development project involving developing English language materials for science education students at Ains Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Materials concentrate on comprehension skills of listening and reading and are taught by a cassette tape player in conjunction with…

Explains that the speech compressor/expander is a piece of electronic equipment useful in second language learning laboratories. Considering the relationship between technology and its use as an aid in achieving fluency in comprehension, the theory of rate alteration in second language learning is supported as a viable tool to enhance any…

Discusses the process of native language learning and explores the relationship between it and second language learning. It is suggested that in a language curriculum, the initial emphasis should be on receptive skills. Accuracy, appropriateness, and fluency in communication are discussed, as well as instructional modes for training in these…

Addresses the accessibility of texts produced by the Overseas Development Administration. This research analyzes a corpus of texts and shows that factors making the texts difficult include poor linguistic structure, contextual structure, conceptual structure, and unclear operationalisation of the reader-writer relationship. (18 references)…