Discusses the teaching of oral communication skills in programs of English as a Second Language. Speaking and listening are discussed because major skill areas, pronunciation is presented as a subset of both speaking and listening development. (114 references) (GLR)

Discusses the practice of paired testing of oral languages, noting the lack of published research evidence and of results from the monitoring of these tests to support their introduction into wider use. Questions whether paired testing is more effective than, and a valid alternative to, the more traditional candidate/examiner model. (SM)

Discusses the difficulties faced by English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language students who study at an English-medium university. Focuses on graduate students' oral needs and difficulties at the university of Hong Kong and argues that student needs should be systematically addressed to ensure students become effective communicators. (Author/VWL)

Explored differences in the spoken English of Texas women, listening to individual women rather than to populations or samples. The study attempted to determine how each woman used available linguistic resources, and it pointed out that every speaker is idiosyncratic and a variety of factors bear on how people talk. (SM)

The lexical variables of word frequency and neighborhood density were hypothesized to facilitate sound change to varying degrees. Twelve children with functional phonological delays participated in an alternating-treatments experiment to promote sound change. Results indicated word frequency was most facilitative in sound change, whereas dense…

Presents data that challenge the view that the omission of functional categories by children with specific language impairment is a manifestation of the same immaturity characterizing the grammar of young children without impairment. Data include atypically high omissions or even almost total absence of determiners in the speech productions of a…

Investigated college students' attitudes and preferences toward error correction in the English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) classroom. A questionnaire was administered to 100 EFL students enrolled in spoken-English classes at a university.(Author/VWL)

Outlines some of the problem areas described by researchers when designing a test of oral production for beginning-level speakers of English, and suggests ways in which these areas may be addressed. (Author/VWL)

Highlights how fables can be used in English-as-a-Foreign-Language classes. Fables offer the opportunity for learners to speak and teachers to reinforce the simple past versus the past continuous or the simple present versus the present continuous. Fables are also useful for teaching writing.(Author/VWL)

This study focuses on changes in listener ability to identify a language after brief periods of exposure. Specifically, it looks at whether minimal exposure to spoken samples of a language improve identification of novel samples and in what ways exposure materials affect listener performance. (Author/JL)

Examines the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. (Author/VWL)

Examines the effect of the use of French as a second language on the performance of subjects in receptive skills (listening and reading comprehension) and productive skills (speaking and writing). Results establish a link between the use of the language after learning has occurred and the difference between pre- and post-test measures. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of the first 4 months of word combinations recorded for an Estonian-English learning child suggests that meaning-based generativity may play a role in this important transition in that mixed language utterances, sequence reversals, and errors revealing early attempts at analysis provide clear evidence that distributional learning alone…

A review of research on second language (L2) speech looks at four issues of process and product: whether speech is different from writing; whether oral discourse patterns differ from one language to another; whether L2 speaker oral skills differ significantly from native speakers'; and how L2 speech develops. (MSE)

Focuses on traditional oath forms--those reflecting the value system of African traditional society in general and Rundi-Rwanda society in particular. The empirical research reported is based on approximately 20 hours of taped conversation among speakers of Kirundi-Kinyarwanda living in Burundi. Oath forms in Kirundi-Kinyarwanda provide…