Describes the use of oral traditional stories to teach sentence cohesion to students of English as a Foreign Language. Oral stories, when written, resemble the pupils' own work. By turning the former into a cohesive narrative, students can improve on their own stories. Temporal cohesion of the stories facilitates this practice. (PJM)

Defines basic writing as a kind of writing students produce as they learn. Examines techniques for error analysis, arguing for one technique in particular--the study of students' oral reconstructions of texts. (RL)

Analysis of French-spoken constructions in which the superlative begins the utterance, rather than occurring within the sentence, suggests that instead of being variants of standard usage, these constructions leave substantial room for interpretation of syntactic relationships. (Author/MSE)

This article looks into why infants learn to talk, using a series of illustrative proposals as to the short- and long-term consequences to the infant behaviors that lead to linguistic competence. The goal of the article is to encourage investigation of behavioral dispositions that nudge the child toward proficiency in the use of the spoken…

Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…

Describes the cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, including its underlying rationale and the different tasks with which it is combined. Introduces the type of stimuli used and the dependent and independent variables typically manipulated; discusses the paradigm's main advantages and drawbacks; and considers its most important areas of…

Argues that there is still an underdeveloped conceptual framework to the British National Curriculum's primary oracy curriculum as a whole, despite the recent School Curriculum and Assessment Authority's "Exemplification of Standards" booklet. Attempts to construct a useful conceptual framework for classroom oracy using different concepts which…

Discusses how teachers in six primary classrooms taught children to synthesize information (regarding reading, social studies, math, science, and social skills). Notes the central role that talk played in both the childrens' learning to synthesize and in the teachers' clarifying what they were researching and how they could best help the children.…

Presents brief annotations of 25 recently published children's books that lend themselves to language play in the classroom. Organizes the items into books that celebrate the sounds, images, movement, and feelings of language. (SR)

A cross-modal priming task was used to investigate the role that a word's imageability and its form class play on the time-course with which word meanings are activated. Presents visual target words for lexical decision at different points through the duration of spoken primes. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a method of using audiotaped dialogue journals as a much needed additional channel for oral communication for English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners. Reveals that this form of journal keeping offers a number of affective benefits. (Author/VWL)

Explored how beginning learners of Spanish develop the ability to use preterit and imperfect past tense forms by analyzing the self-correction behavior they exhibited in their oral production. Each of 15 participants produced five narratives during their second semester of instruction, which were analyzed for the features learners focused their…

Investigates whether readers theatre (RT) motivates English-as--a-Foreign-language (EFL) learners to appreciate expository text and enhances their oral skills. Learners read an expository comprehension passage and then wrote a script based on the topic. Findings suggest RT generated greater appreciation of expository text among EFL learners,…

This interview study examined the relationship between foreign language anxiety and perfectionism. Comments of anxious and non-anxious learners were audiorecorded as they watched themselves interact in a videotaped oral interview. Results suggest that anxious and non-anxious learners differ in their personal performance standards, procrastination,…

Examines the relationship between adult recasts of child utterances and the child's acquisition of syntactic structures. Results indicate that maternal recasts of specific morphemes were related to the acquisition of those specific morphemes during certain developmental periods, whereas other grammatical morphemes were facilitated by expansions…