Reports the preliminary results of an ongoing study of the benefits of building repetition into a communicative task in an English for Specific Purposes course. Compares the performances of two learners at markedly different levels of English proficiency and finds that both benefited from the opportunity to recycle communicative content as they…

Developed a computerized adaptive language proficiency test for a community college in Quebec, Canada and obtained item response theory calibrations on the items from 700 to 800 administrations. Describes projected efforts to detect instances in which "cheating low" (answering incorrectly deliberately) occurs. (SLD)

Examines five factors that may impact the use of second language emotion vocabulary. Considers the impact of language proficiency, gender, and extroversion on the use of emotion words in the advanced French interlanguage of 29 native Dutch speakers, and examines influence of sociocultural competence, gender, and type of linguistic material on use…

Explores the developmental patterns observed when Japanese adult learners acquire the locality condition on English reflexives. Experimental tasks were designed specifically to deal with the methodological problems of earlier research and then administered to Japanese learners of English at five proficiency levels as well as English and Japanese…

Examined pronunciation proficiency in both the first language (Korean) and the second language (English) of bilinguals. Participants were adult immigrants whose age of arrival to the United States ranged from 1 to 23 years. English and Korean sentences were rated by native listeners to obtain measures of pronunciation proficiency. (Author/VWL)

Explores the potential of cognitive linguistic notions such as conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonym for comparing the figurative phraseologies of English and Malay and anticipating second language learner difficulty. A comparative analysis is undertaken that identifies six types of relationship between figurative expressions in the two…

Explores how second-language (L2) learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence. Looks at the extent to which instructed L2 learners of English are aware of differences in target-language production in grammar, which addresses the accuracy of utterances, and in pragmatics, which addresses the…

English language teaching is a field in transition as it seeks new approaches and reexamines older ones in an effort to address the range and level of proficiency required in today's global community. Describes the context of the transitional period, discusses contributions of second language acquisition theory and research, and reviews classroom…

Analyzes the everyday academic language proficiency of German-Turkish Bilinguals who grew up in Germany as children of Turkish immigrants and learned German as a second language. Everyday and academic language proficiency was measured with two different C-tests. Scores obtained were compared with those of a control group of Turkish university…

Investigates 529 Hong Kong students' beliefs and strategies in learning English using a questionnaire to discover whether a relationship exists among belief and strategy and language proficiency in English. Reveals positive correlations with English proficiency for: (1) management and meaning-focus beliefs; and (2) form-focus and meaning-focus…

Identified issues for change in the national foreign language (FL) education agenda: evaluating language competency; articulating instruction across educational levels; increasing the range of languages taught and studied; achieving higher levels of language skills; promoting language competency and use among adults; expanding research and…

Presents the perspectives of a Grade 6 French immersion class from Ontario on a brief exchange experience with francophone peers from Quebec and describes how this experience complemented their classroom language studies. Examined immersion students' perceptions of the operation of both social and cognitive/linguistic processes in the classroom…

This article determines the interlanguage relationships between oral language skills and phonological awareness abilities in 100 Spanish-speaking Head Start children learning English. Children's oral language abilities, measured using the pre-Language Assessment Scale 2000, along with their phonological awareness, measured using the Phonological…

This ethnographic study explores the contradictory literacy practices of 10 high school students of Mexican background from the rural Midwest. The author uses the term "Mexican background" to encompass both settled Mexican Americans and recent-immigrant Mexicanos. Literacy is investigated through English and Spanish in a sociocultural…

In this ethnographic study, I investigate the ways in which students of Mexican descent who are designated as limited English proficient are "acquired" by particular social positions in a northern California high school. Focusing on two interrelated and reflexive phenomena in the high school--standardized testing for assessing English…