This collection of papers is a resource for classroom teachers and program administrators who want to know not only what the communicative approach to language teaching is all about but how the goal of communicative competence is being met in teaching contexts similar to their own. Papers and authors include: "Functional Approaches to…

A guide to the adaptation of oral proficiency testing for classroom language instruction contains excerpts of projects by participants in an American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) workshop. The excerpts are examples of proficiency based curricula and materials designed to personalize instruction and simulate real-life…

The curriculum guide for German outlines the general and specific objectives and content of the courses to be offered in the Jefferson County (Colorado) public junior and senior high schools. An introductory section describes the district's comprehensive and second language education goals and philosophy, summarizes findings of the President's…

Iowa's guide to developing and implementing programs for the state's limited-English-proficient (LEP) school population addresses issues in developing policies, identifying student needs, and planning educational programs. The first chapter discusses the legal and educational rationale for providing equal education to the LEP population, outlining…

Results of the 1988 implementation of the Delaware Educational Assessment Program in 17 school districts are reported for use by state legislators. The report contains a description of the statewide testing program, state-level averages and analyses, and a listing of the averages by content area and grade level for each school and district and…

A self-administering test of oral language fluency was developed for use with high school teachers of French and Spanish. Interviews were also conducted, and biographical data were collected. The original instrument was based on the Foreign Language Questionnaire Pretest developed for the Survey of Global Understanding Project. The focus of the…

This text on foreign language testing provides an overview of testing principles, problems, and practices, and examines the multiple roles of the classroom teacher, as well as the construction and scoring of more formal language tests. The following types or foreign language tests are distinguished: achievement or attainment tests, proficiency…

An overview of classroom and administrative issues related to the education of language minority students in the United States is presented in two sections. The section on classroom issues focuses on four topics: teaching methodologies for English as a second language; the features, titles, and sources of language proficiency assessment…

Following a brief review of the literature on cognates, and a discussion of six arguments in favor of using cognates as a vocabulary acquisition device, a study is described which was designed to determine whether students were able to utilize English-French cognates in listening and reading comprehension in French. Seventy-four tenth grade…

In order to help handicapped children function in regular school programs by the time they enter first grade, the First Chance Early Childhood Program provides precise intervention into the development of children aged 3 to 5 with clearly identified handicapping conditions. Using English and/or Spanish, program staff test and measure the referred…

This publication, part of an annotated bibliography of language teaching materials for Spanish, contains supplementary materials and readers with and without a recorded or visual component. It contains a contents list, the annotated entries, an index of authors, editors, compilers and adapters, and a title index. The first section lists…

This handbook is a compendium of communication testing techniques submitted by French teachers from the United States, France, and Canada. The majority of the handbook consists of sample oral communication tests. The introductory section defines communication, outlines communications testing, and discusses listening comprehension, oral expression,…

This book addresses the question of what tests are measures of. Intelligence, achievement, and personality tests not based on empirical investigation have questionable validity. Some researchers now suspect that almost all tests given to students in all subjects, as well as general tests of intelligence and personality, are essentially language…

The idea of reducing the redundancy of a verbal message in a statistical way is presented as a practiced technique of language testing. Considering the temporality of speech comprehension, and the necessarily sequential intake of information, these cues may include the serial order of elements and transitional probability. To give the background…

This annotated bibliography of English as a second language (ESL) materials for grades K-3 is divided into four parts. The first part, ESL texts, lists a number of series or single texts that are designed to teach the spoken language and reading to the elementary school child. The second part is a list of readers that, although were mostly…