The proceedings of the fourth colloquium of the Groupe de recherche en didartique des langues (Language Teaching Research Group) include eleven papers and four synopses. The papers, three in English (E) and the rest in French (F), cover these topics: cognitive presence in language teaching/learning (F); interlanguage and metalanguage (F);…

Three techniques have been found to be helpful in using dramatic techniques to provide motivation, self-confidence, and self-esteem to students of English as a second language at Hostos Community College. Strategic interaction is a technique based on the open-ended scenario, in which students are free to respond to the problem presented in the…

Research suggests that assimilative motivation is largely responsible for the development of native-like speech in both first and second languages. Analysis of anecdotal evidence of early bilingual development, studies of dialect acquisition, bilingual immersion programs, and studies of language pidginization illustrating the development of…

The reward structure of a classroom refers to the means by which a teacher motivates students to perform school tasks. This document reports on a study in which academic achievement in competitive and reward-structured environments was examined in two high school sophomore level biology classes of equal academic ability. Each class was pretested…

Forty-eight college students participated in a study that (1) explored the degree to which the reader response technique developed by W. F. Brewer and E. H. Lichtenstein to study artificial texts could be applied to natural texts, and (2) compared texts written over a wide time period and from two different literary traditions (six American and…

Predicated on the assumption that many of the problems exhibited by learning disabled children arise from difficulties they have in processing information, the program of research described in this paper was undertaken to (1) identify reading comprehension difficulties that are due to disorders in the reader, and (2) design and test effective…

The realization that the areas of second language and mathematics education share some common features and that educators in these fields may profit by an exposure to research and practice in both fields motivated the production of this paper. From an introduction to the literature, parallels in the history of the two disciplines were recognized:…

Two studies examined the effects of writing on subject learning. For the first study, 322 ninth and eleventh grade students read passages from high school social studies and science texts and engaged in six writing-to-study conditions. Students who wrote essays scored lower on immediate topic knowledge posttests, while the students who used study…

Reflecting the influence of James Britton in the field of language and learning, this book--a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners in the area of language and learning--focuses on recent issues of language development in learning. The book contains the following 27 essays: (1) "Social Interaction as Scaffold: The Power and…

Suggestions on how to enhance college teaching are provided. Lecturing is stressed as a critical component of teaching, and each lecture's introduction, main body, and conclusion must be correlated prior to any given lecture. Information on how to compose and give a lecture includes: what to put in an introduction; what can be done to help the…

To examine the role of phonetic code in memory, a study investigated the use of phonetic recoding strategies in fifth and sixth graders identified as good and poor readers. Subjects--120 students with IQ scores in the average range--were divided evenly between both grades. Thirty subjects from each grade who scored above the 50th percentile on the…

The paper looks at rules for discourse in the classroom and how they may complement or conflict with each other in facilitating the learning of language disordered children in the classroom or therapy session. Six critical skills are identified which children need for a good teaching-learning interaction. They are: attention, turn taking,…

Many previous studies have documented the importance of time needed for learning and time spent in learning as parameters of educational achievement. However, most of this research has not considered the different types of tasks students are asked to learn. This study examined differences in student learning rates, amount of information acquired,…

In order to document the self-directed, spontaneous growth in literary output of a six-year-old child, her writings during a one month period were collected and compiled. It was discovered that the child used writing to organize knowledge about the environment and the operations of print, to maintain personal relations, to establish impersonal or…

Misconceptions interfere with the formation of new insights and provide a faulty foundation. This causes difficulty in the learning of new materials. Therefore, effective teachers strive to know which misconceptions students have, and then develop a plan by which these suspected misconceptions can be corrected or averted. This paper reports on an…