Points to weaknesses of traditional tests and comments on the theoretical background and necessity of performance assessment. Presents specific information on performance assessment and provides assessment examples. (Author/VWL)

Discusses how learners affective domain should be incorporated into development of a second and foreign language curriculum. Addresses theoretical perspectives on the application of affective characteristics into curricular design for second and foreign language teaching and undertakes practical considerations for using this approach. (Author/VWL)

Looks at patterns of conceptual encoding in American Sign Language (ASL), drawing from adults' retellings of a story. Results suggest that ASL encodes a great deal of conceptual information about motion events, significantly more than English and presumably more than most other spoken languages. (Author/VWL)

Examines the possible role of maturational constraints on first language acquisition and second language learning. Reviews research on the special circumstances of delayed first language acquisition and the effects of age on second language learning. Suggests that ability to attain native-speaker grammatical competence may diminish long before…

Focuses on the teaching of languages other than English to those Australian learners who come from monolingual or primarily monolingual English speaking backgrounds and who have had little contact with other languages or few opportunities to use a foreign language in authentic communication during their school years. (Author/VWL)

Describes a connectionist model, using a simple recurrent network trained on a phoneme prediction task, that accounts for the child's ability to identify word boundaries. The model shows that aspects of linguistic structure that are not overtly marked in the input can be derived by efficiently combining multiple probabilistic cues. (Author/MSE)

Suggests a synthetic approach for improving English-as-a-Foreign-Language communicative language proficiency in Korea through institutional teacher training and reflective self training. (Author/VWL)

Examined potential effects of early exposure to sign language on the use of communicative gestures by a bilingual hearing child of deaf parents. Data were analyzed to identify types and tokens of communicative gestures, words, signs, and the ways in which they were combined. (Author/VWL)

Examines the communicative effectiveness of content presented in the audiovisual ode of discourse. Ninety children viewed individually four scenes from an audiovisual cartoon in three grade levels. Questions the value placed on the audiovisual mode of communication and addresses its power to organize and present cultural knowledge. (Author/VWL)

Argues that the compartmentalism of structures observed in mixed languages is the result of the cumulative effect of different contact mechanisms. These mechanisms are defined in terms of the cognitive and communicative motivations that lead speakers to model certain functions of language on an alternative linguistic system: lexical…

Comments on an article that argues that the compartmentalism of structures observed in mixed languages is the result of the cumulative effect of different contact mechanisms. (Author/VWL)

Comments on an article that argues that the compartmentalism of structures observed in mixed languages is the result of the cumulative effect of different contact mechanisms. Argues that compartmentalization, as discussed in the article, does not offer any new explanations over earlier theories. (Author/VWL)

Comments on an article that argues that the compartmentalism of structures observed in mixed languages is the result of the cumulative effect of different contact mechanisms. (Author/VWL)

Offers both complementary and critical comments on an article that argues that the compartmentalism of structures observed in mixed languages is the result of the cumulative effect of different contact mechanisms. (Author/VWL)

Comments on an article that argues that the compartmentalism of structures observed in mixed languages is the result of the cumulative effect of different contact mechanisms. (Author/VWL)