A university writing faculty conducted a study of the concepts of unity in expository prose and of sentence structure as understood by Arabic, Malay, and Spanish speakers to discover why some students grasp some concepts more readily than others. Interviews, surveys, and analysis of written compositions revealed that the reason lies in ways these…

The linguistic situation in Nigeria might be represented as a pyramid with a base composed of 400-500 native languages of which about 100 have been alphabetized. Of these, 51 with more than 100,000 speakers each, are considered regional languages; ten, with more than 1 million speakers each, are considered inter-regional languages; and three…

This annotated compilation of 108 educational publications in Arabic, French, and English includes texts and data on elementary and secondary school curricula in the Maghreb countries (Tunisia, Morroco, Algeria, and Libya). Categories in this bibliography include--(1) Philosophy and Theory of Education, (2) Administration of the Educational…

Contrastive analysis is vitally associated with foreign language teaching. A competent bilingual's intuition about the relationship of the forms in the two languages is the most important part of the valid data for analysis. By means of contrastive analysis major grammatical problems for American students learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) noun…

Examines the role and significance of systematic error correction and explicit grammatical explanation in adult foreign language education. The type and nature of certain grammatical errors which are characteristic of the interlanguage of Arab learners of English as a second language and which seem insusceptible to defossilization are…

This culturally appropriate booklet, written in English and Hmong, Laotian, Vietnamese, Nuer, Arabic, Somali, Bosnian, Russian, and Spanish, describes what to expect from birth to 5 years of age. The booklet explains that different cultures have different child rearing practices that influence the course of the child's development, and there are…

This study investigated similarities and differences in Egyptian Arabic and American English refusals, using a modified discourse completion test (DCT) consisting of three requests, three invitations, three offers, and three suggestions. Each situation included one refusal to a person of higher status, one to a person of equal status, and one to a…

The Bedouins of ancient Arabia and Persia made poetry a conversational art form, and several poetic forms developed from the participatory nature of tribal poetry. Today in most Arab cultures, people may still experience public storytelling and spontaneous poetry challenges in the streets. The art of turning a rhyme into sly verbal sparring is…

Describes two parallel pieces of research in Malaysia to investigate the claim that a conflict may exist between the implicit values underlying English language teaching and the values of Islam. Findings indicate that the majority of students studying English recognized the dangers of absorbing alien values and felt able to deploy English as a…

An Israeli study investigated high school students' perceptions of mathematics, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. A questionnaire measured affect, worth, gender typing, and perceived attributes contributing to success in each subject. Results indicated ethnicity more than gender affected students' perception of subject matter. (SM)

Reports a study of listening problems encountered in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom in the English for Specific Purposes Centre at Damascus University in Syria. Looks particularly at learner strategies, features of the listening text, characteristics of the speaker, attitudes of the listener, the task to be completed as a result of…

A study of error patterns of Arabic-speaking learners of French at a Jordanian university revealed a negative influence of Arabic polysemic words on the learning and use of French vocabulary. It is recommended that second-language instruction make use of explicit instruction in vocabulary that, in the native language, has multiple meanings. (MSE)

This curriculum guide is designed for the Arabic language training of Peace Corps workers in Tunisia, and reflects daily communication needs in that context. An introductory section describes the materials' organization and competency-based approach, and lists the 28 specific competencies targeted and the constructions taught within each…

Fifteen articles are presented in this collection on contrastive linguistics: "On Syntactic Levels--One Tertium Comparison is in Contrastive Linguistics" (L. F. Jakobsen and J. Olsen); "Equivalence in Bilingual Lexicography: From Correspondence Relation to Communicative Strategy" (R. R. K. Hartmann); "How Useful Are Word…

This study attempts to identify what mechanisms might be used to reduce gender bias in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Arabic. Twenty native speakers of Greek and Arabic attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were surveyed for the experiment. The students were: (1) asked to read a standard job announcement in their native…