Four French language instructional activities are described, including an exercise in use of the subjunctive mode, based on an advertisement; a simulation for use in business French; an examination of intonation and meaning in conversation; and an exercise in forming questions. (MSE)

Analyzes discourse features of compositions written in Spanish by secondary school students in Mexico, draws comparisons with those written in English by Anglo-American students in the United States, and discusses the implications of the results for teaching and evaluating composition skills in Spanish language programs. (29 references) (GLR)

Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of young English-, French-, and Korean-speaking children showed that, across the three languages, children go through three similar developmental stages before they acquire the adult system of answering negative questions. Several language-specific phenomena were observed. (BC)

Explores the impact of cultural change on home patterns of communicative interaction between Inuit caregivers and their young children in two communities of northern Quebec, Canada. A longitudinal, ethnographic study of two children with young mothers and two adopted children with older mothers illustrates many changes in the Inuit culture and…

Reports preliminary findings of an ongoing study of prosodic mixes in the speech of three trilingual siblings. The children are primary bilinguals in Portuguese and Swedish, and acquired English as the language of schooling. Prosodic mixes are defined as the intrusion of prosodic patterns of one language into another.(Author/VWL)

This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…

Examines competition between conflicting principles in Kenyan English (animacy hierarchy and discourse pressure to place given information before new), manifested in news discourse. Results suggest some differences between spoken and written Kenyan English pointing to a tendency toward a more standard native-speaker variety in news discourse, and…

In Bulgaria, a complex matrix of power relations governs English language education, and a triangle of international and intercultural relations between Bulgaria, United States, and United Kingdom. In the context of the changing economic and political milieu of central and eastern Europe, a study examines how Bulgaria fits into the emerging…

Compares the cognitive processing of 12 anglophone French students who wrote an argumentative text in their first language (English) and second language (L2) (French). Results indicate that the writers' strategic knowledge and capacity for meaningful multiple-level discourse processing explains the constraining effects of linguistic processing on…

A study analyzed the accuracy of Spanish second-language production across three tasks (narrative, multiple-choice cloze test, fill-in cloze test) on three discourse-determined grammatical items (subject pronouns, articles, past tense aspect) among 74 intermediate and advanced college-level learners. Results revealed different rates of accuracy…

Examines the performance of Hungarian secondary school students on two types of unscripted tasks--an argument task and a narrative task. Focuses on grammatical patterns of learner language, and reports significant differences in the learners' performance. (Author/VWL)

This article concludes a forum that considered theoretical and analytical frameworks applied to developing systems in phonological theory and treatment. It discusses the role of complexity in target selection of children with language impairments: error pattern interaction and complexity; complexity, treatment, and constraint demotion; and…

Although the Italian system of address pronouns is relatively complex, scant attention is paid to the issue in L2 manuals designed for English-speaking learners of Italian. After showing that Italian L2 manuals are not necessarily accurate in the limited detail they provide, we examine specifically the frequent claim that so-called informal…

Most teaching and reference materials on English idioms are primarily intuition based. As such, they often include seldom-used idioms and incorrect descriptions of the meaning and use of some idioms, hence limiting their usefulness to ESOL students. This article demonstrates how this problem can be addressed through a corpus-based study of the…

Discussion of the use of computerized concordancers (computer software packages that enable large quantities of text to be searched for all occurrences of a particular lexical item) focuses on their potential as a tool for students to use in learning a second language. In considering the pedagogical value of such tools, three areas are considered.…