This partial replication of an earlier study that found second language (L2) learners of Spanish have trouble simultaneously attending to meaning and form of aural input addresses the effect of modality on attention to meaning and form by including a written mode and using English as a Second Language. Revealed listening was more difficult than…

Annotates 146 books in the areas of writing, language, literature, and teacher education. (MG)

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomolous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. (Author/CB)

Reviews the literature on the role of background knowledge in second-language listening comprehension, presents findings of pertinent first- and second-language research, and reports on a study showing the importance of schemata in second-language listening comprehension and the role of linguistic knowledge. (34 references) (Author/CB)

Twenty-two hyperactive children were more spontaneously talkative than controls during transitions and nonverbal tasks (nonelicited conditions), but less talkative when asked to tell stories (elicited conditions). Findings suggest that minimal stimulus input precipitate excessive verbal activity from hyperactive children, while stories requiring…

Critically reviews selected research on the learning of English by Chinese speakers, focusing on the difficulties they experience and the variables determining their language learning success. Topics explored include phonology, morphology and syntax, typological transfer hypotheses, analysis of written and spoken discourse, and reading. A list of…

A discussion of the characteristics of effective language learners and the strategies they use in the second language classroom demonstrates how the four main principles of the communicative approach foster the use of appropriate, positive learning strategies. Implications for the language classroom are discussed. (Author/CB)

Reviews the research on how readers or listeners construct mental models of the situation a writer or speaker is describing. Narrative components and spatial models are discussed. (YP)

First-year students of Chinese at the United States Air Force Academy (n=60) were tested for reading speed and comprehension of Chinese passages presented either in characters or romanization. Students read faster and understood more in romanization than in characters. (LMO)

An examination of the logic of second language processing argues that knowledge of language structure does not necessarily result in effective language comprehension. Teachers must help students to bridge the gap between translation, which emphasizes lexical and syntactic meaning, and interpretation, which involves global comprehension. (CB)

Explores how foreign language teachers can respond to students'"system-building" need as well as their grammar and communicative needs, focusing on the implications of such new English-as-a-Foreign-Language trends as the return to grammar instruction, individual development, and the theory of depth processing. (CB)

Suggests that differences between first- and second-language learners are due to principles of universal grammar (UG) that guide first language (L1), but not second language (L2) acquisition. This view can be reconciled with the idea that L2 learners can use UG principles to some extent in evaluating target sentences. (49 references) (Author/VWL)

Discusses the relationship between communicative function and grammar, and the relationship between initiation and discourse. Using a systemic functional framework, a model is set up with with three planes (semiotic, discourse, and language/paralanguage) and two linguistic levels (grammar and phonology) to demonstrate how situation, communicative…

Discusses a study of the expressive qualities of oral language. Results suggest that there is a natural rather than an arbitrary relationship between words and their meanings. Practical applications of this theory of phonetic symbolism in the area of commercial advertising are presented. (CFM)

Preschool children were given a memory task that required repeating a list of animal names and a sentence imitation task. Results confirmed a relationship between word span and language imitation in younger preschool children and the notion of a memory constraint on early spontaneous language. Increasing mastery of linguistic rules appeared to…