Investigated pragmatic declarative and procedural knowledge as realized by routine formulas and conversational strategies with 19 American college students learning German as a Second Language. The results suggest that language instruction that has the goal of developing metapragmatic declarative and procedural knowledge results in real progress…

Reports on reaction time experiments investigating subject-verb agreement and null subjects in 33 Korean learners of German and a control group of 20 German native speakers. Results found that the two phenomena do not covary in the Korean learners, indicating that properties of agreement and null subjects are acquired separately from one another.…

Reports a study that investigated syllable duration and pausing in Chinese speakers learning English as a Second Language. (nine references) (JL)

Discusses the development and use of a computer-adaptive test (CAT) for learners of Chinese. Each time the examinee answers a question, the CAT program registers the answer and, based on the examinee's response, decides whether the next question should be harder or easier. (23 references) (MDM)

The prepositional phrases used in free play discourse by 45 African American preschoolers from low-income homes were analyzed. A statistically significant positive relationship was found between amounts of African American English (AAE) form use and relational semantic complexity. No significant relationships were found between simpler…

Studied effects of an interactive book-reading program with children attending day-care centers whose language development was delayed by 10 months. Children were read to by teachers and parents; read to by parents only; or in a control group. Educationally and statistically significant effects of the reading intervention were found at posttest…

Examined the use and importance of lectal power among candidates interviewed for admittance to a teacher education college in multilingual Singapore. At the syntactic level, the competent or incompetent use of syntactic features such as tag nouns chosen by the interviewees revealed the extent of the lectal power in their possession. (27…

The involvement of culturally and linguistically diverse parents is critical to meeting the unique educational needs of their children. The main points discussed are effective communication, comfort level of parents, barriers between school and parents, and parental literacy. The goal is ultimately to involve these parents in educational decision…

Describes the author's efforts to use the ideas of the psychologist Vygotsky to build on the home language skills of young bilingual children in England and to turn communication breakdowns into learning opportunities. Talking to children about the forms of speech and their roles in communication can accelerate conceptual development. (SLD)

Examined the language learning strategies employed by 374 English-as-a-Second-Language students at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez using the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) instrument. Results found higher overall strategy use by women than by men and significant differences by proficiency level and gender in students'…

Reports on 7 case studies of a 15-hour conversational English program for Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong college students. A comparison of pretests, course work, and posttests showed a small rise in the scores of four students and a nonsignificant drop in the scores of three students. (contains 13 references) (MDM) (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse for…

The hypothesis that good guessers are good second-language learners is investigated. Focus is on one characteristic, cognitive style, of successful and unsuccessful learners. Overall, the study provides continuing evidence for the positive relationship between field independence and English-as-a-Second-Language proficiency. (45 references) (LB)

The relationship between lower-level verbal processing skills and foreign language reading proficiency was investigated with U.S. college students learning Japanese. Focus was on the specific effects of letter identification and word recognition. Findings suggest that efficient lower-level verbal processing operations are essential in foreign…

One teacher's experience teaching Spanish to a gifted fourth grade class and a traditional class is reported. Three Foreign Language Experience Program (FLEX) objectives were used: promoting interest in a second-language and culture, fostering interest in future study, and exposing students to limited language in thematic settings to acquire…

This study of 20 stuttering and 20 nonstuttering preschool children found that stuttering children scored lower on 7 out of 8 language measures, with no significant intergroup differences on articulation proficiency or fluency. There were few significant correlations between measures of stuttering rate, speaking rate, and language performance…