Discussion of the development of oral language skills for elementary age children highlights the use of well-known folk tales such as "The Story of the Three Little Pigs" to involve a group in an oral language experience. The use of puppets is described, and props and resource materials are suggested. (LRW)

Describes the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) School of Languages (for non-English languages). Training is available in eight languages; students are hand-picked volunteers. Staff include Australian service personnel and nationals of the target countries. (SM)

Ways in which studies in second-language acquisition research can illuminate first-language acquisition research are explored. Emphasis is on issues of learner strategies, individual variation, acquisition of late learned structures, bilingualism, Universal Grammar, and the fate of obsolete knowledge in acquisition. (64 references) (Author/LB)

Four issues concerning aspects of the validity of the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery are examined: (1) whether the subtests assess the attributes claimed; (2) the relationship of the subtests to higher order constructs; (3) whether the strategy for measuring affective variables influences correlations with achievement measures; and (4)…

Data from 41 English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers and 161 ESL students were analyzed to examine whether people from various cultures share similar expectations of teacher and student roles. Findings show that role expectations differed in a second-language learning context and outline differences among eight groups. Suggestions for the use…

The Literature Learning Project at the English Studies Department, Institute of Education in Singapore is described. It focuses on determining how well lower-level students cope with their literature texts and also tests the hierarchical properties of Hillocks' taxonomy of skills in reading and interpreting fiction. (18 references) (LB)

Studies on comprehensible input generally emphasize how input is made comprehensible to the nonnative speaker by examining native speaker speech or teacher talk in the classroom. This paper uses Hong Kong secondary school data to show that only when modification devices involve learner participation do they serve as indicators of comprehensible…

An examination of approaches to analyzing speech reporting, found that the various approaches fall into two broad categories: traditional, emphasizing the syntactic dimension; and discourse pragmatic, emphasizing the interaction of syntactic, pragmatic, and stylistic factors. A model is proposed and applied to learner varieties of English and…

Ways that mother tongue and foreign languages are taught in Belgian, especially Flemish, secondary schools are discussed. Some "out-of-school" activities are reported that seem to have a significant effect on students' awareness of languages. The extent to which topics and subthemes of language awareness are present in official curricula…

A creative solution is offered for the problem of finding good quality recordings of classroom events for a master's TESOL (teaching English to speakers of other languages) course on classroom observation: short excerpts from television programs and films where classroom scenes take place. Three instruments are applied to the excerpts. (21…

Describes the compilation of the Future Teachers' Frequency Vocabulary, based on 236 written compositions by students at a teacher training college in Belgrade. Results were compared with the Child Frequency Vocabulary compiled in 1983, based on children's compositions. (LET)

A study of miscorrection in group writing activities among 18 third-year English majors in a Thailand university is consistent with studies of miscorrection in spoken activities. The relatively small amount of miscorrection found suggests that peer feedback can play a role in the development of writing ability. (22 references) (LB)

In a reading comprehension study, random parallel reading comprehension tests in Japanese and English were administered to a sample of native Japanese students enrolled in intensive English instruction at three levels of English proficiency. Evidence for a threshold competence ceiling in both languages was found. (14 references) (Author/LB)

The attitudes of Australian adults required to study a foreign language for a postgraduate degree were examined. Investigators reviewed the students' diaries, which they had been required to keep for 30 lessons. Problems of fear/anxiety, dependence, and loss of self-esteem are discussed. (17 references) (Author/LB)

The Nihongo Tutorial System is designed to assist English-speaking scientists and engineers in acquiring reading proficiency in Japanese technical literature. It provides individualized lessons that match interest area/language ability with available materials that are encoded with syntactic, phonetic, and morphological information. (14…