A November 1990 recommendation by the Hong Kong government's education department to adopt a language-streaming policy is discussed. The policy would have children tested and assigned to English-medium or Chinese-medium instruction in the sixth year of elementary school. Implications of this development are examined from the point of view of…

A case study analyzed the babbling and speech production of an infant, aged 20 to 24 months, whose family members spoke Portuguese, English, and French interchangeably. Focus was on vowel production, choice of lexicon, and the relationship between babbling and speech in the interaction of his languages. The child's utterances were recorded in…

The concept of washback, or backwash, defined as the influence of testing on instruction, is discussed with relation to second language teaching and testing. While the literature of second language testing suggests that tests are commonly considered to be powerful determiners of what happens in the classroom, the concept of washback is not well…

Written as an objective critical assessment, this book is the first linguistic theory guide to categorial grammars. Categorial grammars offer a radical alternative to the phrase-structure paradigm, with roots in the philosophy of language, logic, and algebra. Their historical evolution is outlined and their formal basis is discussed, beginning…

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that children's use of Japanese case particles obeys the grammatical principles introduced at the earlier stage of language development. In previous studies concerning the acquisition of Japanese case examined through the experimental method, it has been suggested that children acquire the functional use…

Among the strategies used by the adult to engage the child in a linguistic interaction, those involving questioning occupy a central position. One of the parameters usually taken into account to differentiate the type of questions directed to the child is the opposition between closed (i.e., yes/no) and open-ended questions. The relevance of that…

A study investigated the nature of college students' English-as-a-second-language self-concept using a hierarchical, multidimensional model of self-concept. Subjects were 306 students in a Hong Kong higher education institution responding to a self-concept questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) replicated previous findings that a global…

This volume includes papers delivered at the Ninth Annual International Native American Language Issues (NALI) Institute. Dick Littlebear's keynote address describes the importance of maintaining Native American languages. James Crawford's "Language Freedom and Restriction: A Historical Approach to the Official Language Controversy,"…

A brief overview of discourse analysis is presented, followed by: (1) a description of cross-cultural discourse analysis; (2) an explanation of how cross-cultural discourse analysis applies to language for special purposes (LSP) in general; and (3) a discussion of selected areas for ongoing and future research areas. Emphasis is on discourse…

The effects of specific guidelines in the taking and rating of tests of language summarizing ability were investigated, as well as interrater agreement regarding the rating of specific ideas within the summaries. The tests involved respondents reading source texts and providing written summaries as a measure of their reading comprehension and…

Results are presented of an experiment involving the reactions toward accented speakers by immigrated native and near-native proficient English speakers from the same Spanish-speaking ethnolinguistic background. It was hypothesized that: (1) the negative reactions of listeners reflected an observable association with a geographic location such as…

This paper examines the schooling achievement of children from bilingual homes and compares them to comparable samples of children from monolingual homes. Extensive follow-up data were gathered in 1985 on a sample of approximately 4,000 high school seniors who entered kindergarten in 1973 as part of a Kindergarten Reading Follow-up (KRF) program.…

A discussion of recent developments, trends, and issues in the study of foreign language learning and teaching is presented, focusing largely on the former Federal Republic of Germany and the Netherlands. First, the situation of foreign language teaching in Europe in general is described, as stated in a declaration of intent of the ministers of…

A study investigated the distribution of post-vocalic /r/ in Singapore English as it may relate to social factors, particularly whether usage appears to be perceived as a prestige feature by those who use it. Informants were 21 subjects from various social backgrounds. Three speech styles representing a range of stylistic variation were elicited:…

A study investigated whether adult anglophone readers of French could be taught to use the organizational patterns (top-level structures, or TLSs) in expository text and whether they could then use this knowledge (the structure strategy) to facilitate reading comprehension as measured quantitatively through immediate free recall. Subjects were 43…