There are a variety of methods to impart the cultural setting of a foreign language. The teacher can use, among other things, cultural assimilators, films, mini-dramas, culture capsules, background lectures, and native-speaking class visitors. This last technique can be extremely effective but difficult to arrange and difficult to control once it…

This report on the use of the Spanish language in the United States discusses the Spanish-speaking population, the language itself, and bilingual education in the United States. The background about the Spanish-speaking population includes the following topics: (1) "A Nations of Immigrants," (2) "The Population of the…

It is not sufficient for students in foreign language classes to simply internalize the sound system and grammatical structure of the target language or to memorize the vocabulary. Speaking is not merely a linguistic event, but rather involves an extensive system of norms for the social interaction. The relationship between speaking and social…

This study explored the attitudes of high school teachers of Spanish as a foreign language regarding the following: the use of Spanish, teaching Spanish as a heritage language to Hispanic students, the role of English in the United States, and the use of English at school or home. Participants were teachers of Spanish in three Louisiana school…

This study compared the writing evaluations performed by native English speakers and native Japanese speakers who teach writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan. Subjects were 32 Japanese and 32 native English-speaking EFL instructors, divided into 2 mixed groups of equal size and proportion. One group evaluated an authentic…

A study extended previous research on second language learners' use of interlanguage knowledge in making grammaticality judgments. The grammatical construction under consideration is the existential-presentational (E-P) sentence. This construction is described, and it is shown how, due to universal constraints of information structure, it is…

A series of studies examined the media use habits of Hong Kong students trying to improve their English. Subjects for the first three studies, 138 pre-service student teachers in Hong Kong, completed questionnaires. Frequency of media use provided some indications of students' level of commitment to the study of English. In study four, students…

The struggle of one Cree community, the Waskaganish (formerly called Rupert House) in Quebec, to maintain its own language and culture within the larger multicultural Canadian context has led to the creation and development of a linguistic experiment, the Cree Way Project. After a discussion of the Canadian historical context, this report…

In an effort to develop non-biased assessment techniques for the native languages of native Canadians, and to facilitate identification and intervention for language disorders among native children, the ratings of children's Inuktitut language samples by an untrained Inuit teacher were compared with length complexity data derived by linguistic…

Two studies investigated: (1) aspects of the language of native-English-speaking (ES) and non-native-English-speaking (NES) parents of children learning English and (2) the demands made on the listening of young children learning English from native-speaking parents and non-native-speaking parents. Information in the parent study was drawn from…

In 1962, following the discovery of valuable natural resources in Northern Quebec, the Government of Quebec decided to commit itself to Eskimo and Indian affairs in the area, preparing these people who were already physiologically and psychologically adapted to the territory so that they could play a personal role in its development. An…

In Japanese colleges and universities, native speaker teachers in English departments are sometimes called on to teach courses that furnish English majors with the necessary tools to write their graduation theses in English. This study was undertaken at one university to determine what constitutes a graduation thesis, what aspects of the thesis…

This paper considers the situation of a non-native speaker of English who is educated in teaching English to speakers of other languages in the United States, and then returns to his or her country of origin to teach. This teacher encountered many difficulties and much resistance to the teaching methodologies learned in American graduate schools…

A study examines the past-tense inflection process for native and non-native speakers of English. Subjects, ten native speakers of standard British English and ten proficient non-native speakers of English, were tested for responses to pseudo-irregular and -regular verbs according to their phonological distance (i.e., prototypicality) to known…

In studying the role of context in speech act performance, the tradition has been to use controlled elicitation instruments that allow for manipulation of social dimensions. The assumption is that by controlling social context, all respondents will assess social relations very similarly, although little research has dealt with the validity of this…