This paper looks at how corpus data was used to design an Italian as an L2 language learning programme and how it was evaluated by students. The study focuses on the acquisition of Italian verb-noun collocations by Chinese native students attending a ten month long Italian language course before enrolling at an Italian university. It describes how…

A group of seven Japanese-language Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) testers licensed by the American Council on the Teaching of foreign Languages (ACTFL) conducted research related to ACTFL-OPI criteria. They first examined 24 audiotaped interview tests to see what kind of consistency there would be when individual testers applied general criteria…

This paper presents a number of hypotheses concerned with individual learning strategies based on a pre-experimental, observational case study. Three children (two seven-year-olds and one eleven-year-old) native speakers of Hebrew were the subjects of the study. The language data collected from them consisted of spontaneous speech about their…

This essay considers three areas in Spanish grammar that generally cause difficulty to English-speaking learners: the use of "ser" and "estar," the difference in use between the preterite and imperfect tenses, and the use of the subjunctive. Like most problematic grammatical elements in any language, these points are difficult for non-native…

An experiment evaluated the impact of an integrated formal, analytic, and functional communicative approach to second language teaching in French immersion on French language proficiency. The impetus for the study arises from research indicating that immersion children show persistent weaknesses in their grammatical skills despite the fluent,…