Identifies some underlying assumptions about language, testing and its use, and second language acquisition (SLA) for those current on the issue of oral proficiency assessment. Suggests that even with its limitations, the assessment procedure can become a source of data for future SLA research. (Author/LMO)

Present results of a longitudinal study of vocabulary development as it takes place in a classroom setting involving elementary-level Swedish-speaking learners of English. The study used spew tests requiring pupils to write down as many words as they could in one minute that began with a given letter. (Author/LMO)

Attempts to distinguish the role of the structure of a message in determining the different modalities of decodification and memorization in oral discourse based on the theories and experiments of Ragnar Rommetveit of the Oslo School. (CFM)

Argues that humanities specialists should become more informed and involved in the development of computer uses in natural language processing. (LMO)

Study of a one-year-old's earliest use of prepositions found that spatial oppositions ("up-down") were learned first, and used in non-prepositional senses prior to prepositional usage. "With,""by,""to,""for,""at," and "of" were learned later and used to express case relationships and more often misused and omitted than the earlier-learned…

The order of difficulty of positions and the segmentability of phoneme categories are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that phonemes are functioning units in the perception and production of speech. The final version of the program for teaching phonemic segmentation is described. (Author/LMO)

Two experiments employed story telling to investigate whether production is adapted to comprehension. Subjects were more likely to specify instruments from stories if the instruments were atypical or important to the story. A mathematical model proposed that instrument concepts may be selected at three stages in the production process. (Author/LMO)

Trained junior high school students were compared with untrained students on comprehension and recall after both were told to construct questions while reading text passages. Results indicate that training improved the question quality only for those students who had above average pretest free recall scores. (Author/LMO)

Describes four experiments on the speech segmentation procedures of English listeners listening to English words and compares them to earlier work based on French speakers listening to French words. The results indicate that the segmentation process characteristically employed by French speakers and English speakers differs. (SED)

Discusses the differing points of view of foreign language teaching research and second language acquisition research. The article shows that second language acquisition research works with linguistic data as a product of output, while foreign language teaching research, in addition, tries to interpret classroom data by taking into account the…

Examines the listening process and delineates some of the strategies used by listeners to extract meaning from spoken input. The importance of listening comprehension development in second language acquisition is discussed, as are types of activities and listening materials which can be used to foster development of listening comprehension. (SED)

Deals with the issue of sentence processing in a second language (L2) showing how L2 learners resolve the problem of competing factors of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the processing of L2 utterances. The results of a study involving sentence interpretation by L2 learners of English are presented. (Author/SED)

Investigates the metalinguistic ability of monolingual or bilingual children between five and nine years of age on two language tasks (grammaticality judgment and correction). (HOD)

Studies in self-questioning designed to improve students' prose processing are reviewed in the context of three theoretical perspectives: active processing perspective, metacognitive theory, and schema theory. The effects of self-questioning training on students' prose processing seem successful. Constraints of content knowledge and metacognitive…

Elucidates the reading problems of nonnative English speakers, noting reasons for the problems, giving signs of the problems, and demonstrating results of the problems. (HOD)