The Swedish National Board of Education studied 7,095 youths (mostly immigrants) who were compulsory school students in 1978-79 (Grade 9) and who spoke a language other than Swedish at home. The part of the study reported on in this document focused on the students' attitudes toward instruction in the home language and toward courses offering…

There are pros and cons to the use of a concurrent approach, that is using two or more languages in the same context. The new concurrent approach (NCA) advocated here resulted from a desire to bring together the child's two languages in a way that would further the child's language development and, at the same time, lead to satisfactory school…

This collection of exercises, intended principally for parents and teachers engaged in early childhood education, contains 30 pages of exercises designed to foster speech and vocabulary development of young children. Although the book is primarily intended for use with native speakers of French, the exercises would be useful for elementary school…

Some of the "supra-grammatical" features of scripts written by undergraduate students in India are examined. The script writing was a test administered to assess the proficiency of students in the advanced cognitive and rhetorical skills involved in composition, both in their native language and English. The particular type of composition chosen…

In this memorandum the National Immigration and Naturalization Board of Sweden has summarized recent legislative reforms providing home language training and home language lessons for immigrant children and children belonging to linguistic minorities. (A single definition of "immigrant children" has been applied throughout Sweden since…

The following papers on interdisciplinary cooperation in second language instruction are included: (1) "Language Teaching: Possibilities for Interdisciplinary Co-operation," by James E. Alatis; (2) "L'insegnamento della letteratura italiana (The Teaching of Italian Literature)," by Ezio Raimondi; (3) "Objective Evaluation and Transparency," by…

Material comprising teachers' questions and pupils' responses was collected during ordinary lessons in order to gain an understanding of the linguistic interaction during lessons in the mother tongue. (Author/LMO)

Discusses controversial issues and describes several innovative programs involving language instruction for thousands of American school children with little knowledge of English. Lines have been drawn between "English only" advocates supported by the Reagan Administration and bilingualists favoring instruction in both English and native…

Tracing its evolution and stressing the role of native language instruction, a proponent of bilingual education argues that native language instruction allows simultaneous content and second language skill development, diminishes alienation, and facilitates intellectual development, and that criticism of such instruction is founded on emotional…

Articles focus on the following: reading comprehension and writing; an approach to argumentative discourse writing; a didactic experiment on the construction of two academic texts; Denzil Romero's work; communication and its implication--a vision from the teaching of the mother tongue; orthography/spelling in the Real Academia Espanola (RAE)…

This teacher's guide, written in French, intended for the instruction of both French as a first language and French as a second language (immersion), provides a host of strategies for teaching writing skills in the classroom (grades 1 through 7). Section 1 is designed to bring the teacher's awareness to the training procedure, discussing the…

This digest outlines the reasons for and challenges of developing the language skills of heritage language speakers and describes one effort to carry this out, the Heritage Languages Initiative. Specific sections address the following: developing language skills of U.S. residents; the range of language proficiencies of heritage language speakers;…

The increasing number of students who enter U.S. schools from homes where languages other than English are spoken, and the recognition that proficiency in non-English languages is a valuable national resource, have generated interest in the field of heritage language instruction. A heritage language student is a language student who is raised in a…

This publication, launched by the French Council of the Alberta Teachers' Association and prepared under the Millennium Partnership Program in Canada, presents a collection of essays written by French language immersion students in the elementary and secondary grades. Essay topics touch on the following themes: remembering, dreaming, celebrating,…

This book, in English and French, explores the concepts of assimilation and community vitality, as well as statistical evidence regarding the vitality of Francophone communities outside Quebec. It highlights trends and seeks to clarify certain issues related to the current demographic reality of Francophone communities outside Quebec. The two…