Describes the University of Delaware's drama-based approach to enhancing the intelligibility of international teaching assistants (ITA). This training addresses the segmental and suprasegmental features of ITA pronunciation within the context of cultural, pedagogical, and linguistic factors unique to the university classroom environment, and…

Describes the results of using field-specific written materials in a language laboratory setting to teach oral skills in a support course for international teaching assistants for the purpose of promoting automaticity in oral production and raising the intelligibility of students through the improvement of fluency and pronunciation. (25…

The collection of essays on phonetics and phonology, entirely in French, includes: "Le calcul de la frequence intrinseque. Necessite du rapport a une ligne de reference" (calculation of intrinsic frequency; necessity of a line of reference) (Conrad Ouellon); "Caracteristiques microprosodiques de duree et d'intensite en lecture et en…

A descriptive study of Ngaanyatjarra, an Australian Aboriginal language, examines two major areas of sentence structure. First, it describes the grammatical structure of the sentence, beginning with the simplest sentence and moving into verb clusters, complex sentences, and juncture strategies. Second, it outlines the meaning and usage of various…

A discussion of points raised by Dell Hymes in his article "On Communicative Competence" leads to a proposal for a clearer and more comprehensive theory of communicative competence based on two models, a matrix of discourse analysis and a model of communication interaction. Pedagogical implications of the theory are considered, including the…

Teaching a second language and culture means teaching culturally different patterns of perception, communication, and effect. When teachers of English as a second language develop sensitivity to what students bring to the classroom and understand the students' reasons for their actions, their teaching can aid and not hinder students' full…

The paper describes activities incorporating literature, music, and cultural material that are used with foreign language majors at National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and makes suggestions for their use in the pronunciation class. Even at advanced levels, Asian students of English as a second language (ESL) have difficulty with English…

The proceedings include the following papers: "Why We Study Child Language"; "Children's Use of Information in Word Learning"; "An Examination of the Initial Mapping of Verb Meanings"; "Evidence for the VP Constituent from Child Korean"; "The Role of Stress, Position, and Intonation in the…

A study explored the use of a text-copying task for the determination of syntactic constituent structure. It was predicted that the task would be a naturalistic, reasonably direct, and sensitive psycholinguistic research method. In two experiments, 70 subjects wrote out copies of typed passages. The points where they paused and looked back to the…

This is a longitudinal study of a child's acquisition of Mandarin phonology between the ages of 1;2 and 2;8. During this period, the child was much less verbal than many children reported in other child phonology studies. The study consists of two parts. The first part is a description of the child's "proto-language," in which he used…

Most studies of language acquisition overlook the fact that a child learns language in the context of acquiring the social skill of conversing known as "turn-taking." The few studies of verbal turn-taking in children suggest that prosodic features (suprasegmentals) and turn-taking skills are integrated by the age of two years, nine months, and…

The goal of this study is to discover the phonetic difficulties encountered in the acquisition of French as a second language by English-speaking children. The children are studying French in a total immersion situation without benefit of structural exercises or special French language laboratory classes. Of particular interest here is the extent…

Features of parental speech to young children was studied in four English-speaking and four Spanish-speaking families. Children ranged in age from 9 to 12 months for the English speakers and from 8 to 22 months for the Spanish speakers. Examination of the utterances led to the identification of 34 prosodic, paralinguistic, and interactional…

This is a contrastive analysis of British English, American English and Hungarian sentence prosody. The first part is an introduction stating the study's objective, scope and data, and briefly surveying the related literature. It outlines the study's view of prosodic features and its principles of comparison and prediction. Part Two inventories…

Considers two aspects of knowing language, besides grammar and vocabulary, that are often understressed: 1) perspective taking (through rhythm and intonation) and 2) manipulation of language variation. This observation is discussed in relation to the contrast between incidental and intentional learning, and an argument is made for an intimate…