Suggests that ethnic American literature might help promote FL study through themes also recurrent in the target group literature and through English usages reminiscent of target language features. Sees these shared characteristics as a potential aid to learning, usually obscured by the emphasis placed on contrastive aspects. (MES)

Presents a proposal to bring literature into the basic program of instruction and make it a meaningful component of the learning process. A model lesson describes how literary texts can be perceived and studied as performances of a language. (CB)

As may be seen in a brief examination of several characters and scenes in Mario Puzo's "The Godfather," analysis of ethnic literature must focus on both the cultural and the linguistic aspects of literature. Often the syntactic structure reflects the structure of the native language of the writer, while word choice frequently depends…

This article stresses the idea that teaching communicative competence and the ability to deal with a variety of language situations should be the goal of foreign language teaching, with grammar instruction in a secondary position. Teaching by means of "dialogues with options" is discussed and sample dialogues for Italian instruction are given.…

The distinction between artifact and tool is introduced into the study of language diversity and the posting of linguistic universals. A complicating factor in all language investigations is the use of language as the chief tool to create new language. Analogy and metaphor are considered as two major creative forces at work in all languages.…