Discusses controversy between transitional versus maintenance bilingual education programs in Spanish. Claims policy of static maintenance cannot find support in a view of linguistic competence that considers language development to be complete by adolescence and the same among individuals. Suggests developing students' home language or abandoning…

This commentary on language curricula in universities is followed up commentaries by a language center director, on perspectives from a Spanish department, the case of Japanese, the role of foreign languages in universities, and foreign language enrollment numbers. (VWL)

Explores special problems posed by idiomatic expressions for learners and teachers of second languages stressing need to integrate idioms into teaching. Presents program providing a classification of idiomatic expressions based on contrastive analysis of Spanish and English. (BK)

Reconsiders the general question of the role of articulatory phonetics in the second language (L2) classroom and reviews the phonetic presentation in 10 recent first-year Spanish texts. Proposes a phonetics program based on the notion of a learners' dialect, then measures the phonetics of the textbooks against a learners' dialect. Argues against…

Responds to a previous article on native-language (L1) use in the collaborative interaction of native English-speaking adult learners of Spanish as a second language, which found that the L1 serves a critical function in students' attempts to mutually define task elements, provide each other with scaffolding help, and externalize inner speech.…

Examines a sampling of current ESL reading instruction practices, addressing the concern that the lack of a generally accepted theory of L2 reading constitutes a major obstacle to teaching and testing ESL reading skills. Summarizes the results of two studies and discusses their implications for ESL teachers. (MES)

While foreign language textbooks have improved in recent years, the standard grammatical base remains unchanged. Instead of the usual morphologically-based syllabus, a semantico-grammatical one is suggested in which the categories, relating meaning and form, make it possible to teach language structure in a coherent and communicatively relevant…