Reports on a process/product study undertaken to increase understanding of the nature of language instruction and its effect on language proficiency. Also discussed are a number of pedagogical issues arising from the study. (30 references)

Two members and a former member of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) Policy Council respond to Raimes' concerns about the TOEFL Test of Written English, particularly regarding the Educational Testing Service's research agenda and its effect on English-as-a-Second-Language instruction and graduate school admission. (17 references)…

This study found that three oral discourse genres (script, picture description, and replica play narration) were able to characterize development in discourse abilities in 6 children (ages 5-7) with brain injury and 43 nondisabled children. Brain-injured children produced shorter discourse performances with more off-task talk but showed…

Systems for classifying speakers' communicative intents are typically limited in scope, in applicability across the full developmental range of language abilities and disabilities, and in their theoretical foundations. Criteria for an adequate system for analyzing communicative intents are discussed, and a system is proposed which meets those…

Using 38 beginning-level university students of French, this study confirmed that student listening comprehension of a foreign language video would be facilitated by the use of an advance organizer consisting of several short sentences, written in French, that summarized chronologically the events in the video. Sample test items and answers are…

For 42 Italian students studying English as a foreign language, there was no significant difference in subjects' success in recognizing words, regardless of whether words' final consonants were fully realized. Exercises that focus attention on sounds at the ends of words make learners practice a strategy that neither they nor first-language…

Analysis of the responses of Spanish, Chinese, and German learners of English-as-a-Second-Language to English sentences with empty pronominal categories found that, although empty pronouns were pragmatically more natural in finite clauses of Spanish and Chinese than in English or German, only the Spanish subjects had significantly higher mean…

A study found that trained standardized patients could provide a reliable assessment of English proficiency of foreign medical graduates by comparison with a standardized language test, but further research is needed to determine whether it is necessary to provide a clinical context for language assessment. (MSE)

Investigation of the development of metalinguistic consciousness examines bilingual children's perceptions of language contact in a situation of marked social imbalance between their first and second languages. The exploratory investigation focused on how school-age bilinguals view written forms in Spanish and Nahuatl. Forty-five Spanish/Nahuatl…

Responds to a previous article that discussed paired testing of oral languages and focused on the role of the examiners, suggesting that the paper was not necessarily correct in saying that the problems associated with paired testing are outweighed by its positive advantages. This paper argues that paired testing has many potential problems that…

Discusses the suggestion that grammatical-specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider impairment involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking, in particular the structure of the verb phrase with resultative…

Examines key educational policies and practices that limit opportunities for bilingual education teachers to obtain academic language proficiency in Spanish. Bilingual-education teacher training cannot make up for ground lost by educators who lack prior attainment of math and science Spanish-language skills. Effective Spanish-language competency…

Discusses the utility of the German Speaking Test (GST) as a general test of German foreign-language proficiency, examining whether it can be used effectively in classroom and institutional foreign-language settings and how proficiency ratings based on the GST relate to examinees' real-world German communicative abilities. Caveats regarding the…

Discusses the role of assessment in determining whether the investment in an early start in a foreign language has been worthwhile, suggesting that it is important for reasons, such as feedback to parents and the public, informing national policy development, and school self evaluation. Describes an independent evaluation of modern languages in…

Describes the process for generating, from a text, three types of multiple-choice vocabulary cloze tests: one based on n-th word deletion, one using user-specified frequency ranges, and one based on a particular word class. The article discusses the extent to which good test material can be produced realistically by computer-aided systems and the…