Relationships among locus of control, academic program, and sex of 267 ninth-graders were studied. As hypothesized, students in the advanced level program were more internally controlled than were general or basic level students. Although locus of control was related to academic level, its relationship to gender was not consistent. (SLD)

A study involving 176 secondary school students was undertaken to determine how specific motivational processes are related to the salience of mastery and performance goals in classroom settings. Findings suggest that classroom goal orientation may facilitate maintenance of adaptive motivation patterns when students adopt salient mastery goals.…

The plausibility of including Legal Spanish (LS), especially for students who will pursue a career in law, in the undergraduate advanced-level Spanish curriculum is discussed. Topics covered include the rationale for LS majors and minors, background resources, pedagogical materials, an LS experimental course, and class meetings and required…

Described is a two-week summer residential program designed for students who have been identified through one of several middle school talent searches. Discussed are the assumptions and goals, course content and pedagogy, evaluation, and materials of the program. (CW)

Reports a study in Hong Kong that used a think-aloud protocol to examine the use and effectiveness of Chinese university students' inferential strategies for dealing with unknown words while reading in English. Findings show that advanced second-language readers are moderately efficient at using local and discourse context clues, although wrong…

Describes three activities that formed part of an action-research project carried out in advanced English-for-academic-purposes classes. Outlines the activities, presents samples of student responses, and evaluates the usefulness of academic journalogs as used in these classes. (Author/VWL)

Describes an exercise of parallel text analysis or production in German as a foreign language, which demonstrates to the students that contextual factors influence the selection of specific variants. The variants must be chosen out of so-called macroprogrammes. A macroprogramme lists the linguistic and extralinguistic means a language offers to…

Investigates the use of discourse markers by advanced Turkish learners of English. The research discussed here aims to make an initial contribution to the study of how discourse markers are used by second-language learners, and to illustrate why such research should be valuable and necessary component of interlanguage pragmatics. (Author/VWL)

Examined effects of captioned videotapes on advanced university English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL)students' listening word recognition. Videotaped materials consisted of episodes from two educational television programs. Found that availability of captions significantly improved ESL students' ability to recognize words on the videotapes that also…

Reports on an activity carried out with upper-intermediate and advanced level English-as-Second-Language learners to help them increase their word-meaning awareness and expand their active vocabulary. (Author/VWL)

This study was a comparative investigation of face-to-face and written electronic conferences. The participants were advanced English as a second language (hereafter: ESL) students. The two types of conferences were compared in terms of textual features and participation. There was no statistically significant difference in the total number of…

The goal of the current study was to examine the influence of providing more optimal testing conditions and evaluate the effect this has on the validity of the score inferences across ELL students with different needs, strengths, and levels of language proficiency. It was expected that the validity of the score inferences would be similar for 3rd…

This paper discusses research conducted in the spring of 1991 that measured the relationship of reading subtest scores to teacher ratings of students' reading abilities. Sixty-eight advanced-level students in an intensive English program took an institutional version of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and a specimen reading…

In 1987, a study was conducted to develop a profile of high school students who were currently enrolled in advanced placement, accelerated, or honors coursework in Utah, based on data reported by students who registered to take the American College Testing (ACT) Program exam. ACT responses obtained from 13,605 of the 20,930 students who graduated…

When intermediate and advanced students of English as a second language (ESL) begin an English composition course, they face the task of creating logical extended discourses in English. Often, while the sentences they create are free from obvious grammatical errors, they are stylistically unacceptable, vague in meaning, misrepresentative of the…