This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the major areas of research in the field of child language acquisition. It is divided into seven parts and 19 chapters. Part I is an introduction and overview. Part II covers central issues in the study of child language acquisition, focusing on syntax, including those of innateness, maturation, and…

This book brings together the contributions of individual language scholars, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and neurophysicians. Each chapter focuses on the human cognitive processes involved in language activity and the impact of language diversity on them. The basic issue is how to correlate language diversity with the universality…

This edited volume includes the following chapters: "Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics and SLA: A Psycholinguistic Perspective" (Dennis R. Preston); "Getting Serious about Language Play: Language Play, Interlanguage Variation, and Second Language Acquisition" (Elaine Tarone); "Oppositional Talk and the Acquisition of Modality in L2 English" (Tom…

A discussion of the role of developmental psycholinguistics in second language instruction begins by examining the nature of communicative intentions, their classification, and their role in the language classroom, drawing parallels between first language acquisition and second language learning. Stages in the progression from single words to…

A study investigated how repetition was used in the telling of personal narratives to create emotional involvement on the part of listeners, to evaluate stories, to prevent listeners from asking questions and from losing the story's focus, and to justify narrating that particular story in a cross-cultural setting. It was assumed that narrators…

A Dutch study of the relationship between different student cognitive styles and foreign language achievement focused on the development and analysis of a grammar test for English as a second language. The test consists of ten subtests requiring the student to manipulate aspects of English syntactic, morphosyntactic, and morphological structure.…

This paper discusses the sociolinguistic problems inherent in multilingual testing, and the accompanying dangers of cultural bias in either the visuals or the language used in a given test. The first section discusses English-speaking Americans' perception of foreign speakers in terms of: (1) physical features; (2) speech, specifically vocabulary,…

This study explores several research questions. Of primary concern was the identification of variables that might be employed to predict the potential of students to succeed in monolingual English classrooms following transition from bilingual programs. Although consideration was given to various background and demographic factors, the principal…

The reflections in this paper represent part of a study of disadvantaged 13 to 15 year-old children of immigrants in Switzerland. This section deals with the process of learning spelling. In order to observe the students' learning, the same dictation was given four times during the school year. The results were studied intuitively and…

This document on the threshold level in French is the result of a project commissioned by the Council of Europe to produce a system of units in foreign language instruction for adults in Europe. The "threshold level" is conceived as the compilation of knowledge and skills a person would need in order to express oneself simply but…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: various factors in terms of attitudes toward reading; the effect of group counseling on self-concept and reading achievement; the effect of three modes of…

INTENDED AS AN INTRODUCTORY COLLEGE LINGUISTICS TEXT, THIS BOOK PRESENTS IN AN ORDERLY, AUTONOMOUS WAY THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED FACTS AND PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTICS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE A PROFESSIONAL NEED TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT LANGUAGE. DIVIDED INTO TWELVE SECTIONS, THE BOOK DESCRIBES IN DETAIL IN A PART DEVOTED TO PHONOLOGY, (1) PHONEMES, (2)…

This manual outlines lessons which concentrate on three areas of language study: grammatical skills, oral skills, and writing skills. Each lesson plan states the objective, the activities to be performed, the materials to be used and gives sample criteria for evaluating the student's mastery of the lesson. The grammar exercises include: sentences…

The question of teaching a standard dialect to Chicano students who are studying abroad has implications for teaching any standard versus nonstandard dialect. The University of Colorado has a program at the Universidad Veracruzana in Jalapa, Mexico, in which the policy is to teach standard Mexican Spanish (the cultivated norm of Mexico City) as an…

Papers on Spanish bilingualism and Spanish in contact with other languages include: "The Study of Language Contact: An Overview of the Issues" (Carmen Silva-Corvalan); "Language Mixture: Ordinary Processes, Extraordinary Results" (Sarah G. Thomason); "The Impact of Quichua on Verb Forms Used in Spanish Requests in Otavalo,…