Forty-eight graduating native Cantonese-speaking students on a BA Honours course in teaching English as a Second Language responded to a questionnaire about their ability in English, their use of English--including code switching and code mixing--in their daily life and their practice teaching on the course, and their view of the appropriateness…

Assessed global foreign accent in sentences and production of two English consonants by Japanese college students during their freshman and senior years (T1, T2). Auditory evaluations by native English-speaking listeners were used to determine to what extent the consonants produced could be identified as intended at T1 and T2; and whether the two…

Describes Montessori's vision of young children as natural linguists and how home and school can support children's natural abilities in one or more languages. Presents five basic principles of second-language acquisition--related to educational environment, the acquisition process, components of proficiency, and cultural context and time--and…

Secondary school teachers invented a context for Louisiana's Eighth Grade French and Spanish Proficiency/Credit Exams based on real-life situations students would encounter on class trips to Disney's EPCOT Center. Test activities assess performance in four language skills areas: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Students' reaction to this…

Reports on the Minnesota Articulation Project, providing an overview of the projects' three principal working groups: political action, curriculum, and assessment. The article then outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the proficiency-based assessment instruments developed in French, German, and Spanish and describes in detail the content and…

In response to criticism of his study of input processing and processing instruction, a relatively new concept in second language teaching, the author discusses a number of issues raised, including concepts underlying input processing, methodological concerns, instructional materials used in the study, the concept "traditional instruction," use of…

Based on experience teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to primary school children, the author finds the "ESL Standards for Pre-K-12 Students" outlined by the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages do not define ESL progress as specific skill levels but offer open-ended descriptors and sample progress indicators…

Analyzes results of a previous study on speech recognition (SR) technology for its ability to distinguish between native- and nonnative English speakers. The current study concludes that SR technology has potential for testing the oral proficiency of English-as-a-Second-Language students.(ER)

Examines the acquisition of tense and agreement by L2 learners of French. Interviews were conducted with English-speaking children acquiring French as a second language and with grade-matched native French-speaker controls. Results revealed that items encoding agreement emerged before items encoding tense, suggesting that the abstract grammatical…

This pilot study investigated Standard American English (SAE) morphological development for 15 bilingual Hispanic preschoolers. Analysis of data from spontaneous language samples revealed emergent use of Brown's (1973) 14 grammatical morphemes. Because mastery generally was later than for SAE speakers, clinicians are urged to use caution when…

Examines the efficacy of a weekly movie class through students' in-school achievement, a general proficiency test, and surveys about their cultural awareness and interest in English. An experimental group watched movies with viewing guides every week for 2 months. They improved significantly more than the control group in their in-school…

Presents an approach for developing oral proficiency in the advanced conversation course that proposes, as an organizing principle, the use of Swales's concept of genre as a class of communicative events that share a communicative purpose. It is concluded that focus on genre can improve proficiency performance and articulation. (eight references)…

Argues that a gap exists in university-level foreign-language curriculum that requires a "bridge," that is, a course designed to take students from where they are to where they should be to study for a foreign-language major and describes the bridge course in Hispanic culture at the University of New Mexico. (four references) (CK)

This study sought to determine the effectiveness of supplementing college-level intermediate Spanish courses with formal instruction in pronunciation. It found that this multimodal methodology resulted in significant improvement of target language pronunciation for the 43 subjects in the experimental group. Contains 30 references. (MDM)

Discusses the role of language development in educational achievement and the implications of this role for curriculum development. Children's preschool knowledge of language and its development in early school years is discussed. How their language experiences in school might enhance their language development also is outlined. Highlighted are…