Play patterns of 11 "language slow" preschool children and 11 younger "language competent" children were examined to determine whether age or language use contributed more to mature play. Matched by language level, subjects were drawn from five middle-class preschools and were of middle to upper socioeconomic status. (RH)

Discusses the experience of a committee at the University of Southern California that was formed to implement the university's requirement that foreign languages become a "Skill Level" requirement. This means that the student must meet the requirement by performing at a certain level on a proficiency examination. (SED)

Reviews projects undertaken by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages during the past year. These include the production of a set of proficiency guidelines in a generic format as well as in French, German, and Spanish and projects to relate oral proficiency testing to instruction. (SED)

Describes the growth of Seeing Essential English (SEE) and suggests that the use of SEE in several school districts is responsible for students' high scores on two tests of English understanding. Advises further research to gauge the contribution of SEE. (EKN)

Maintains that measuring syntactic error alone is inadequate and that syntactic maturity should also be considered. Discusses ways of measuring syntactic maturity in spoken English of nonnative speakers and examines the relationship of syntactic error to syntactic maturity. (EKN)

Between 1898 and 1948, English was the language of instruction for most post-primary grades in Puerto Rican public schools. Since 1949, the language of instruction in all grades has been Spanish. We use this policy change to estimate the effect of English-intensive instruction on the English-language skills of Puerto Ricans. Although naive…

Discusses the role of intonation in language development in relation to the use a child makes of the concept of a story. Concludes that children express much meaning through intonation, that this system may be more developed than lexical or syntactic systems, and that complex literary competencies can be developed early in life. (JOW)

Describes a model unit from the new basic German course for the Defense Language Institute designed to teach appropriate language and responses for everyday situations. (EKN)

Presents study which evaluated L2 performance of 15 bilingual preschool children in terms of basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP). Results show that several aspects of L2 proficiency by which teachers frequently evaluate students' mastery of English are poor predictors of…

Discusses producing German language plays as a way to increase student facility in spoken German and at the same time promote campus-wide contact with German language and culture. (EKN)

Lists five objectives in creating an item bank for language proficiency test items and describes the design of an item bank card. Briefly discusses item analysis and population distribution in this system and points out the numerous advantages of the system and conditions for its success. (PMJ)

Focusing on the distinction between inferential measures of language proficiency and tests which assess language skills more directly, the article discusses briefly various dimensions relevant to language proficiency testing and some of the special problems involved in the testing of equivalent proficiencies. (NQ)