Some of the issues involved in validating two English second-language listening comprehension tests are examined. The tests were two different levels of a listening summary-cloze measure developed for use in a battery of language proficiency tests in the second and fourth years of university-level study in China. In them, students listen to a talk…

Two traditional principles have served as the basis for the involvement of linguists in social issues, namely the principle of error correction and the principle of debt incurred (Labov, 1982). It is argued that an additional principle should motivate linguists to take a more proactive role in social issues, the principle of linguistic gratuity.…

Prior research on early lexical acquisition in bilingual infants has been used by Clark (1987) to support the Principle of Contrast, which states that every two forms contrast in meaning. In this study of an English-Spanish bilingual child, it is argued that the Principle of Contrast is not applicable to bilingual acquisition in general. Daily…

This article suggests that the terms "bilingual education, multicultural education, bilingual instruction, and total immersion" refer to four distinct processes, each needing to be defined more clearly. To define them, a theoretical framework is proposed based on two sets of variables. The first set integrates the anthropological model of human…

This study investigated the relationship between ideology and speech patterns in Modern Israeli Hebrew. Eighty native speakers of university age were provided with descriptions of events in which some desired object or information was the goal, then asked what they would say to attain the goal and to construct examples of stylized uses of speech…

A study of the translation process compared the decisions that native speakers (experts) and non-native speakers (non-experts) made that influenced resulting translations. Subjects were 40 students, graduate students, and faculty in a university foreign language department. English language proficiency was measured for native speakers by using the…

A study demonstrates the existence of a wartime register in Japanese newspaper journalism and characterizes its major linguistic and stylistic features. Special emphasis is placed on the aspect of modality as related to point of view. Modality expresses the mode within which the propositional content of a sentence is presented as certain,…

A study investigated the acquisition of grammar-based reading routines in both first and second languages (L1 and L2). The objective was to determine whether routine integration of grammatical information to construct a semantic representation of the text is a matter of general cognitive development or language-specific learning. Subjects were…

An overview of current theories of reading and the acquisition of literacy skills by children is presented. A research framework in which reading can be described in terms of the processes employed in other language uses is introduced and used to explain the failure of some children to learn to read. An ongoing research program is described that…

Research on themes that offer practical and theoretical bases for teaching language and content simultaneously is discussed. Three theoretical perspectives are cited that are relevant to this approach: the input hypothesis (Krashen's monitor model), the bilingual proficienty theories (Cummins' language proficiency model and the views of its…

This serial is intended as a forum for the presentation, in print, of the latest original research by the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics and other related departments at the University of Kansas. Papers are as follows: "Interpreting St. Clair's Comanche Texts: Objective Case Marking and 'Same Subject' Dependent…

A specialized bibliography on foreign language testing compiled by the British Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) is presented covering the period 1981 to 1987. This supplement consists of 200 abstracts from the journals "Language Teaching and Linguistics: Abstracts" and "Language Teaching." It also contains an…

As Thailand's exports to other Asian countries and to the West increase, the status of English as the language for trade and communication has gained more importance. Initial investigation of postgraduate (science and engineering) students' needs at Chulalongkorn University indicates that the skills the students want to improve most are listening,…

The eight papers in this volume, prepared by staff and students of the Institute for Applied Language Studies of Edinburgh University, address a variety of issues in applied linguistics. The papers include: (1) "A Coding System for Analyzing a Spoken Database" (Joan Cutting); (2) "L2 Perceptual Acquisition: The Effect of…

A class "on" metaphor can be usefully distinguished from a class "in" metaphor. A class on metaphor concentrates on metaphor theory and function. To teach in metaphor would be to coach students in pragmatics, to guide them in the study of how key metaphors are used and help to structure discrete universes of discourse. For…