English-speaking children and adults who were learning Dutch at school and at work, without signigicant amounts of foreign language instruction, were tested at five-month intervals during their first year in Holland. The test battery included tests for active and passive control of phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. Significant…

A 2-year, 8-month old boy with a language handicap was the subject of a 5-month training program which investigated the generalization of articulatory ability during and after a series of sessions aimed at correcting the boy's misarticulation of the letter "t." Before training began, three matters necessitated attention: (1) the establishment of…

The report outlines the administrative setting and describes the experimental design to be used in field testing the Mark II model of the Automated Pronunciation Instructor (API) system. It presents the draft instructional curriculum for the Spanish-English and the English-Mandarin Chinese language pairs, and describes the hardware, pedagogical…

The feature system of Nitinaht is characterized by extensive exploitation of the possible glottal and pharyngeal articulatory notions. The proposed orthography for Nitinaht partially reflects the distinctive feature composition of segments, in particular for affricate (delayed release) and glottalized (constricted glottis) consonants. (Author)

This article discusses language planning in Israel, and specifically the activities of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Its development from the original Hebrew Language Council is traced, as well as its membership which is made up of leading Hebrew scholars and writers. The aims of the Academy were basically three: (1) to assemble and carry…

The primary contact which many non-native speakers have with the English language is visual. Thus, there exist many competent readers of English who are ignorant of pronunciation. In the past, English pronunciation has been taught in a case-by-case fashion, without regard to principles relating orthography to pronunciation. This is a report on one…

This paper discusses the concept of error in the learning of the phonology of a second language and argues that the concept of error must be viewed as a positive element, an initiation of the process of successive approximations toward the correct phonetic realization. Based on the idea that interference between two languages generates a…

This paper examines the phenomenon of final consonant deletion in clusters which do not agree in voicing and compares this phenomenon with clusters sharing the voicing feature. The speech studied is that of Puerto Rican and black Harlem teenagers. The data reported here refutes many of Bailey's (1972) claims. Clusters where voicing is not shared…

A foreign language teacher has always been influenced by his conception of what language is; e.g., if he thinks language is mostly words, he concentrates on teaching words and measures success by the size of his pupils' vocabulary. The study of pronunciation gave rise to several developments within linguistics, which has up to the present time…

Despite the traditional problems posed by word pronunciation and etymology, a system of spelling instruction which takes into account some of the following suggestions should prove helpful to teachers at both the elementary and secondary school levels: (1) make children word-conscious--anything which makes the pupil look at and think about a word…

"English Through Patterns" is an oral approach text designed for Spanish students of English as a foreign language on the beginning level. Material is presented in selected basic sentence patterns sequenced and controlled so that each new structure introduces new items and reinforces previously taught patterns. Part I (Lessons 1-6) presents…

The object of this study was to develop a model from which Appalachian students can learn to differentiate between their dialectal pronunciation of certain vowels and the pronunciation of those vowels in Standard American English. A secondary objective of the model is to enable students to imitate Standard American pronunciation. The first phase…

Although standard descriptions of spoken Brazilian Portuguese assign separate allophones to both /1/ and /u/ in utterance-final position after a vowel, it has been observed that in rapid speech native speakers articulate /l/ and /u/ in this position so that they are indistinguishable to the average speaker. To answer questions about the possible…

This text is designed to be used as supplementary material by the more advanced student of conversational Japanese. (The Japanese appears in Hepburn romanization and an occasional kanji.) While the author has made an attempt to grade the material in increasing stages of difficulty, he suggests that even the advanced students begin with the first…

A well-organized set of phonics rules will enable the reader to identify many words which are in his vocabulary, but which he has not encountered before in print. The rules must be sequenced in a manner that capitalizes on their applicability to the vocabulary of the typical reader. This can be achieved only when the rule set is defined on a…