Tested the hypothesis that accented speech heard at a reduced rate would sound less accented and more comprehensible than speech produced at a normal rate. In two experiments, English native-speaker listeners rated a passage read by 10 high-proficiency Mandarin learners of English. Findings suggest that a general speaking strategy of slowing down…

Twenty-two Spanish-speaking children ages 3 to 6 years participated in an elicited production study designed to test whether children's ability to produce subjunctive relative clauses related to their ability to pass a false-belief task. Results indicated a strong correlation between children's ability to use the subjunctive mood in relative…

Investigated the links between second-language classroom anxiety and second-language writing anxiety, as well a their associations with second-language speaking and writing achievement. Findings suggest that second-language classroom anxiety is a more general type of anxiety about learning a second language with a strong speaking-anxiety element,…

Investigated differences in oral-language development, emergent literacy skills, mathematical reasoning and concepts, and behavior for full-day versus half-day kindergarten students in the Irving (Texas) Independent School District. Found statistically significant advantages for the full-day program, particularly for English-speaking students.…

Illustrates how tasks can be used systematically as context for developing learners' knowledge about language, skill in using language, and teachers' ability to teach. Outlines role for tasks in language learning, identifies limitation in previous studies of tasks to promote learning, and suggests need for tasks to lead learners to integrate…

This study compared the spontaneous oral narratives of 10 underachieving and 10 achieving gifted eighth graders. Results found significant differences across the dimensions of story length, episodic integrity, story grammar, and sentence complexity between the two groups, suggesting the presence of narrative language problems in underachieving…

Investigates differences between college students' reading and listening processes in conjunction with variation in oral-based or literate-based language style. Finds that: listening required less cognitive effort than reading, irrespective of language style; listeners and readers alike best comprehended oral-based discourse; and that reading was…

Details the influence of English on British Sign Language (BSL) at the syntactic, morphological, lexical, idiomatic, and phonological levels. Shows how BSL uses loan translations, fingerspellings, and the use of mouth patterns derived from English language spoken words to include elements from English. (Author/VWL)

Evaluates the claim of uniform size and shape restrictions in prosodic development using a cross-sectional database of English-speaking children's multisyllabic word productions. Suggests children's increasing faithfulness to unstressed syllables can be explained by different constraint rankings that relate to edge alignment, syllable structure,…

An overall examination of the two forms of oral proficiency testing currently in use in most language teaching programs across the country: the oral proficiency interview and the simulated oral proficiency interview. Test administration, response elicitation, and rating procedures are examined comparatively, and a general overview of the…

Studied the case of bilingual acquisition across two modalities to examine diverging hypotheses about the types of knowledge underlying early bilingualism. Three children acquiring Langues des Signes Quebecoise and French, and three children acquiring French and English were videotaped over a year while novel and familiar speakers of each child's…

Studied the linguistic competence in the written language of deaf children and adults and the linguistic development in children and adolescents with Williams Syndrome. Presents qualitative data on spoken and written Italian from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies conducted over the last 10 years. Studying these two different populations can…

Criticizes the circumstance that limits the opportunity for students to speak French in casual conversation to an extent that would permit them to truly improve their command of the language. The article maintains that giving students the opportunity to develop on their own the ability to express themselves orally is a valuable teaching goal.…

Presents various activities for use in the foreign language classroom. These include listening to songs to develop an awareness of intonation and rhythm, reading literature to learn the functions of relative pronouns, engaging in conversation to become proficient in a second language, and preparing a weather report to improve one's vocabulary…

Using a corpus of 18 child-adult conversations, this study distinguished adult utterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgment (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance served a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usually responded to by children, but the form of response…