This study explores the relationships between a child's discriminatory abilities in the areas of pitch, intensity, rhythm, timbre, and tonal memory and his capacity to comprehend and speak the Spanish language. The Spanish accent is analyzed on the basis of intonation, stress, sinalepha, and phone production. These factors were tested both in…

This report presents a survey of foreign language programs in Latin America. English as a second language is discussed as well as the teaching of other foreign languages. Remarks are made concerning language programs at various levels, teaching methods and materials, teacher preparation, status, and organizations, and acute problems. In the…

The 13 articles in this report fall into four categories: programs for the culturally disadvantaged, teaching composition, curriculum revision, and detailed classroom practices. Mildred A. Dawson outlines compensatory programs used in Sacramento, California, to prevent drop-outs; Lois Grose concentrates on the pattern-practice method of teaching…

This news letter summarizes language research in composition, writing skills, and linguistic usage carried out over a three year period (Grades 4, 5, 6) with a sample of Swedish students. Subjective assessment of student compositions was carried out. The marks from these assessments will serve as criteria in evaluating various objective measures.…

Research into the psychology of perception can uncover important discoveries for more efficient learning. There must be increased understanding of the processing of input and the pre-processing of output for improved language instruction. Educators must at the present time be extremely wary of basing what they do in the foreign-language classroom…

Written for students at the secondary level, this book details the historical development (10,000 B.C. to the present) of the 3 American Indian linguistic groups located in the 4 geographical areas of North Carolina (the Algonquians on the coast, the Iroquoians, including the Tuscarora on the coastal plain and the Cherokee in the mountains, and…

The sound systems of Vietnamese and English have very little in common and therefore the Vietnamese learner of English will have great difficulty with pronunciation. This guide points out the specific problem areas and gives pronunciation exercises to deal with each problem. Twenty-eight pronunciation lessons are included, preceded by two…

Children and adults speaking English, Hungarian, and Italian were asked to describe sets of pictures which manipulated the pragmatic category of givenness. The working hypothesis was that there exist rule-governed relations between the perception of certain categorical aspects of the communicative situation and the use of certain conventional…

This study is a description of the linguistic differences between three Persian dialects. The underlying aim of the study is to provide the linguistic facts necessary to evaluate the implications of divergence between the dialects for students of Persian. It would appear that if students experience difficulty in adjusting from one dialect to…

This article discusses the various linguistic and psychological theories from which language teaching has drawn, and their application in certain instructional materials. (CFM)

Students in freshmen English classes (N=273) at a Japanese university were given translation and acceptability judgment tests involving the verb "give" (in text). The selective use of two predicate structures for "give" in appropriate contexts of usage were examined: (1) GIVE (noun phrase NP and participial phrase PP) and (2)…

Six papers dealing with decision support and knowledge based systems are presented. Five of the papers are concerned in some way with the use of artificial intelligence techniques in individual or group decision support. The sixth paper presents empirical results from the use of a group decision support system. (CLB)

A longitudinal study was conducted using 18 mildly/moderately retarded 14- and 15-year-olds to investigate word knowledge acquisition and subcategorization features of the words. Retarded children's errors were highly correlated with word frequency. Two interpretations (gradual acquisition of word knowledge and a reorganization theory) are…

A study analyzing word characteristics that make them more easily translated from English to French (or vice versa) indicates that translation efficacy is most strongly influenced by the frequency of the word in the language, its familiarity, and the similarity of the French equivalent to the English word. (Author/CB)

The research and the study focus on the problem of dissociated learning. Why do students fail to connect with knowledge? The purposes of the study are: to summarize research pertaining to brain growth; to describe educational approaches and tactics consistent with this research; to test a brain research-based program designed to connect children…