This study compared the relative effects of traditional and processing instruction on the acquisition of Spanish past tense verb morphology among 61 college-level learners of Spanish. Results revealed significant gains in both comprehension and production for subjects in processing instruction, while subjects in traditional instruction had…

Priority goals and objectives of 1,373 intermediate-level college students of French and Spanish and their instructors were examined. Results show students' goal priorities to be related to oral/aural skills of speaking, listening, and pronunciation; instructors ranked speaking high but pronunciation low. The survey instrument is appended.…

Studies the role played by native language transfer and task formality in the second-language acquisition of the Spanish voiced stop phonemes /b d g/ and their spirantized variants to identify specific problems affecting learners. Results indicate that native language transfer markedly inhibits acquisition of the voiced spirants. (21 references)…

Bilingual Latino high school students who studied Spanish as an academic subject demonstrated a heightened awareness of how to use their two languages as complementary resources in school and professional settings. A case study traces one student's literacy development in Spanish over 4 years and her ability to use it as a resource in her…

Fourth semester students of Spanish as a foreign language at the university level in the US participated in two kinds of comprehensible-input based instruction, an extensive reading class that combined assigned and self-selected reading, and a "Reading-Discussion" class that consisted of assigned reading, debates and discussions. Students in both…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using Spanish captions, English captions, or no captions with a Spanish language soundtrack on intermediate university-level Spanish as a Foreign Language students' listening/reading comprehension. A total of 213 intermediate (fourth semester) students participated as intact groups in the…

This article addresses the learning of second language (L2) writing skills to show how pictures can be used as an effective guided writing tool to facilitate students' writing process and to improve their writing proficiency. A study was conducted with 53 university students who had a prior knowledge of Spanish in secondary school. All students…

In response to problems encountered in teaching Spanish to native speakers who had learned Spanish as their first (oral) language but because of their schooling were literate only in English, a study was conducted to explore issues related to development of native-language literacy skills after acquisition of second-language literacy. Two adult…

This paper describes a project that evaluated World Wide Web resources for language teaching and learning. First, issues of quality of Web resources, the need for an evaluation procedures, and the difficulties of implementing such procedures are discussed. The development of criteria on which to base such an evaluation is then outlined. Criteria…

This paper describes results of a questionnaire administered to over 700 students registered in lower-division Spanish courses in November 1973 at the University of Texas at Austin. The purpose of the questionnaire was to survey student attitudes and to move toward a means of evaluating beginning and intermediate level courses. On the basis of the…

This handbook was first planned for use by the teacher and students of two experimental introductory Spanish classes of the University of South Carolina, employing the materials "Espanol a lo vivo" during the 1971-72 and 1972-73 academic years. One group followed a traditional approach to instruction having class four times weekly, while the other…

The study behaviors of Spanish-speaking students at a large two-year public college in the United States were studied using the Inventario de Comportamiento de Estudio (ECI) (L. Bliss, D. Vinay, and F. Koenigner), the Spanish version of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (C. Weinstein, 1987). Behaviors of these students were compared with…

This paper begins with a literature review of research on syntactic maturity, defined as the developmental stages from one- and two-word utterances to the hierarchical structures of adult speech, and seeks to answer questions in the context of past and current research in this area. It attempts to study some of the ramifications of the movement…

This paper discusses how to teach Spanish subject matter to U.S. college students, focusing on one professor's experiences teaching an upper level Spanish class, Spanish Subject Matters, to students who plan to be K-12 or bilingual classroom teachers. The paper stresses the current need for bilingual teachers, suggesting that a teacher does not…

Profiles students' awareness of the functions and influences of expert input in their writing. Data include results of a survey of foreign-language and English-as-a-Second-Language writers' beliefs about feedback behaviors known to interact with revision processes. Results indicate that each group perceives expert response as serving distinct…