An excerpt from "La classe de conversation" ("The Conversation Class") by Pierre Burney which has appeared at regular intervals in various issues of "Le Francais dans le Monde." (DS)

Discusses the feasilility of the use of repeater devices in the language laboratory in order to enable the student to "recapitulate effortlessly and and indefinitely any utterance of any length which is causing him difficulty or is of special interest. (FWB)

Lecture given before the Annual Conference and Course on Reading (23d, Univeristy of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa., July 10-21, 1967).

Prompted by a lack of materials to test students' discrimination and production of minimal pairs and similar words, a teacher developed a technique that uses actual production of words in sentences. Students' reactions have been very positive, and the test is brief and simple to administer. (MSE)

Includes 4 brief articles concerning: (1) how to express refusals; (2) how to tell jokes and humorous stories; (3) how to learn the use of "a qui" and "a quoi" through a classroom game; and (4) how to test pronunciation intelligibility. (MES)

Discusses some reasons offered for the ease with which young children learn a second language. Children of kindergarten age can learn language in a playlike atmosphere in groups no larger than 10-12 children. Pronunciation is the outstanding skill, but comprehension and active speaking also show favorable results. (PJM)

Dictation is a form of practice for teaching spelling, pronunciation, and the unstressed function words. Disadvantages such as unnaturalness can be avoided by selective dictation, where a text is chosen based on the level of the class. In addition, structures that might be problems for the class should be included therein. (PJM)

Discusses rules of pronunciation and grammar in French. Rules of spoken French are contrasted to those of traditional grammar. A visual method is suggested for teaching "oral grammar." (AM)

Black children and White children were equally intelligible to Black adult listeners, while White adult listeners found White children significantly more intelligible than Black children. Noise deteriorated word discrimination scores of the Black and White listeners differently. (Author/RL)

It is demonstrated that the phonemes represented by the diagraph "ng" can, with few exceptions, be predicted when the structure of the word in which it appears is taken into account. The regularity of English spelling is discussed, and suggestions are made for use of the findings in classroom situations. (Author/RM)

Examined large corpus of spontaneous English conversation for pronunciation of "the" and speech patterns immediately following. Found that speakers use "thiy" (versus "thuh") pronunciation to signal immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production; problems were at many levels of production, including articulation, word…

Focuses on a program providing foreign language instruction to students whose background derives from the country of that language's origin. The article notes that students in this program work on their own, coming together for small group conversation sessions. The article points out that these students often regard the study of their language as…

Investigates Japanese as it is spoken in Tokyo within the variationist framework, focusing on the variable (ng). Quantitative analysis was made of the data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews. Findings confirm the existence of inherent variation and orderly heterogeneity. (17 references) (Author/CK)

Reports results of a series of modified matched-guise tests measuring the attitudes of school principals, pupils, and other judges in Sweden towards foreign-born teachers' language proficiency and suitability to teach in a Swedish school. Results indicate that all groups of judges are accurate in judgments regarding accentedness. Judgments of…

Provides evidence from a small northern U.S. city for Canadian raising, a Canadian phenomenon that heightens the onset of diphthongs in /ai/ and /au/ relative to the low central onset in neighboring dialects. Findings suggest that the Canadian diphthong varieties may not be conforming to the U.S. norm, but instead that the two varieties are…