Describes design and progress of the Ontario Test of English as a Second Language (OTESL) developed in response to need for a common instrument for Ontario postsecondary institutions that need to determine whether students in academic programs have adequate English skills. The test provides placement and diagnostic information to ESL programs for…

Discusses the hypothesis that right hemispheric cognitive processes underlie establishment of meaning in language and in processing of linguistic gestalts, and examines several lines of evidence. Also examined is the hypothesis that societal complexity is related to differences in relative dependence upon cognitive processes controlled by cerebral…

Examines the hypothesis that adults and children have media-specific conceptions of picturing and that the functional uses of photography and drawing differ across development. Results showed an age progression from viewing photography as only reflecting the real object to viewing it as a medium that allows for control and alteration of reality.…

In Experiment 1; English-speaking preschool children were given sentence verification task to study development of concept of truth-functional negation. Expereiment 2 was a cross-linguistic replication with Korean-speaking preschool children. Despite same cross-linguistic differences in negation system, Korean-speaking children showed essentially…

Describes a study done to determine which intonational parameters are most important to the meaning being conveyed within different social settings. Defines the factors that appear to influence the use of pitch and/or intensity prominence on negative words. Found that, in many situations, interactional rules take precedence over linguistic rules.…

Discusses the apparent opposition between the concepts of language learning and language acquisition in the context of adult second-language study. Proposes that these two concepts are mutually supportive, not mutually exclusive. Demonstrates how the implications of learning vs. acquisition can be integrated into a communicative…

Discusses the continuing controversy over how to teach grammar. Finds that the traditional, structural, and transformational approaches each have their strengths and weaknesses, with none clearly better than the others. Suggests that the teaching of grammar, while not the key to improvement in written English, will always have a place in the…

Describes an exploratory study which examines the differences and similarities in the way native and nonnative speakers of English process complete texts and also examines the possible uses of a macro-textual approach in the teaching of foreign language reading. (SL)

Proposes model of language teaching designed to balance teacher/learner input, whole class teaching vs. small group work, and teaching language as either form or function. Although amount of teacher intervention varies, all classroom activities are communicative, providing a situation where students are involved, contributing and interacting with…

"Re-tell" is examined as an activity designed to involve students in an interactive process. Authentic reading and listening passages provide a context in which the student can negotiate for meaning and extract information from the surrounding environment (the real world), thus fostering language acquisition via exposure to various learning…

Regular debating can be an effective way of improving the performance of ESL pupils and of assessing their language-learning propensities. It requires a lot of listening as well as speaking and generally seems to foster confidence in language use. The relationships set up in debating are pupil-pupil rather than pupil-teacher. (CFM)

Discusses first and second language acquisition in terms of behavior modification and structural exercises in terms of operant conditioning. The validity of the comparison is also discussed. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Describes two experiments which were conducted to investigate the responses of eight-year-old children to differently worded spoken instructions for simple tasks, for which sentence length and complexity were systematically varied. Results indicate that children's accuracy improved with shorter and slower instructions. (Author/DB)

Many specific implications for classroom reading instruction can be derived from work in linguistics or psycholinguistics. (JH)

This article discusses sociolinguistics and how certain of its norms bear a direct relationship to the teaching objectives of EFL. (CLK)