A series of studies examined the media use habits of Hong Kong students trying to improve their English. Subjects for the first three studies, 138 pre-service student teachers in Hong Kong, completed questionnaires. Frequency of media use provided some indications of students' level of commitment to the study of English. In study four, students…

The Graded Objectives in Modern Languages (GOML) approach has contributed to the reform and development in the teaching of modern languages in the United Kingdom during the past 10 years. The introduction of shorter-term goals has revolutionized the way in which many teachers think about what should be taught to their students, and how it should…

A study investigated the extent to which native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Portuguese understand implicatures in Brazilian television commercials in Portuguese. Subjects were nine Brazilian graduate students and 11 American students of Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Correct inference of the…

Mental rehearsal is a somewhat ambiguous term in the literature of language acquisition, psychology, and second language learning. However, in second language learning it refers to an important strategic behavior involving silent covert practice of the other language, undertaken in relation to an oral or written, future or past language task. A…

This paper is rooted in an expanded view of construct validity, whereby the role of testers does not end in the development phase of the language tests they employ. Rather, testers need to follow the uses of these tests and examine issues of utility, relevance, ethics, and interpretation. The studies reported here focused on three national…

Aspects of communication, particularly in the language classroom, that contribute to or inhibit communicative interaction are discussed in this 11-chapter book. The first chapter offers a general discussion of the elements of interpersonal communication. Chapters 2 and 3 outline strategies that language teachers might adopt to engage and sustain…

Since the enactment of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, funded universities have provided African language instruction at the postsecondary level. With an increased interest in the less commonly taught languages (LCT) demonstrated by the 1988 Foreign Language Assistance Act, several African Studies Center universities provide instruction…

This paper reports interim fundings of two studies focusing on student responses to learning strategy instruction in first year Japanese, Russian, and Spanish foreign language classrooms. Data were collected from four groups of students: 15 high school students of Japanese, 13 college students of Japanese, 31 high school students of Russian, and…

This paper explores the issue of the acquisition of English word stress by ESL learners whose mother tongue is Cantonese. Based on the theoretical framework of metrical phonology, this study examines the following parameters related to English word stress: branching versus non-branching rime structures, dominance in the metrical foot and the word…

A discussion of classroom research on language teaching looks at what researchers have learned so far from attempts to study what happens in the language classroom. The discussion is based on the idea that it is not the currency of instructional method used that matters most, but rather a fuller understanding of classroom interaction. The first…

An English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) educator of migrant students in a rural county in Oregon used a whole-language approach to language and reading instruction. Although reading instruction in Spanish was preferred, lack of Spanish-speaking personnel and limited ESL instructional time prohibited that approach. In whole-language ESL, the teacher…

An English teacher at Hokkaido International School, Japan, guided his students through the writing process of thinking up ideas for writing topics and developing and revising those ideas into competent works. The class was composed of seven non-native speakers (in grades nine through twelve) who tried to achieve fluency in English within the…

A study examined the problems that four graduate students of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds encountered during their initiation to the written discourse community of American academia during their first year of graduate study in the United States, and how these problems were dealt with. Qualitative data including participant and…

A study investigated the English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) listening comprehension strategies used by university students in Taiwan. The subjects, 51 freshmen at National Yunlin University of Science and Technology with a low-intermediate level of English language skills, were administered a test of listening comprehension (questions appended)…

This study investigated whether "avoidance" is an appropriate term to describe the linguistic behavior in which the learner with a particular first-language (L1) background tries to underproduce or underrepresent a particular second-language (L2) structure. The first section seeks to establish the general psycholinguistic principle that…