A survey-interview exercise is described as it evolved through English-as-a-second-language students' efforts to develop better spoken language skills. The exercise provided students with experience in using spoken English in interaction, learning first-hand about local ideas and attitudes, and reflecting on and discussing the experience in the…

Two college-able learning-disabled writers' social and cognitive profiles and the sense of audience in their written texts are examined. The students' deficits (visual and organizational cognitive processing, and oral language comprehension/production) affected their writing, and the quality of their audience awareness was related to the nature of…

Compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in American and British English, French, German, Japanese, and Italian. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure mean fundamental frequency, variability, utterance, duration, and pause duration. (67 references) (Author/CB)

Reports on longitudinal data from a group of three- to six-year-olds (N=64) that supports a hypothesis that acquaintance with nursery rhymes positively affects children's reading ability. Data showed a strong relation between early knowledge of nursery rhymes and success in reading and spelling, despite differences in social background,…

Current research supports the notion that language users make both unconscious and conscious choices when accommodating their language for public use, incorporating regional and social distinctions as well as notions of correctness and acceptability. Such decisions occur at the level of communicative competence and become part of the communicative…

Analyzes ethnographic data regarding one prolonged speech event, the negotiation of a driver's license at the Ministry of Transportation in Puno, Peru, from the perspective of Hymes' redefinition of linguistic competence. Implications for the acquisition of second language communicative competence are also discussed. (Author/CB)

Analysis of 38 international teaching assistants' (ITA) performance on general-topic and field-specific SPEAK tests (tests of spoken English proficiency) indicated that, although ITAs as a group did not differ significantly in performance across the two tests, pass or fail recommendations for eight subjects would depend on which test was used. (27…

A variety of classroom games and exercises are described for developing oral and reading skills in French. Included among the games are a giant advent calendar, a reading contest, description and identification games, questions and answers, guessing games, a trivia game, and a spelling exercise. (MSE)

Examined the phonological memory capacity, rate of articulation, phonological encoding, and perceptual-processing abilities of 13 specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and 13 language-matched normal (NL) children. The results of a nonsense word repetition task showed that SLI children repeated significantly fewer multisyllabic nonsense…

This study describes and analyzes differences in student output across ethnicity and gender in a mixed monolingual English and bilingual Spanish/English class in order to understand how second-language oral skills are developed in a mixed classroom. Participant observation, informal interviews, and audiotaped classroom and tutorial interaction…

Integrating debate on controversial topics into the syllabus enriches learners' interaction with the Spanish language and stimulates intermediate students to express themselves in Spanish. This article lists some practical suggestions for setting up debates as well as criteria for evaluating them. (Author/CK)

Examines Nickels's claim that interactive models of lexical access in speech production cannot account for naming data from a group of anomic patients. This paper reiterates that the behavior of connectionist models is not easily predictable without running the appropriate simulations, and discusses the role of frequency in lexical access in…

Presents an analysis of five first-person oral narratives of Aboriginal children of Western Australia recorded outside the classroom. These narratives are compared with a first-person oral narrative of a non-Aboriginal child and with teacher-led interactions in the classes of which the Aboriginal children are members. (26 references) (Author/CK)

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…

The Columbus, Ohio, Public Schools Level I Foreign Language Oral Assessment Project is reported. Using a small-group or team approach, the oral production of large numbers of students can be evaluated quickly and efficiently with brief, real-life examples from the body of tasks students have previously been assigned. (18 references) (Author/LB)