This document contains three papers from a symposium on organizational culture and climate that was conducted as part of a conference on human resource development (HRD). "A Comparative Profile of Workgroup Climate in Different Organizational Settings" (Allan H. Church) reports on a comparative analysis of climate data on more than 5,000…

Examines the use of cohesive conjunctions by student writers in Hong Kong to ascertain how it differs from native speaker use, to gauge the extent to which teaching, textbooks and transfer are influential, and to analyze the extent of misuse and unnecessary use. The article makes suggestions for teaching implications and further research. (18…

A study investigated the communication strategies used by students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in electronic mail interactions with native speakers of English. Subjects were 22 university students in Taiwan paired with a like number of pre-service EFL teacher trainees in the United States. The discourse of 87 e-mail entries by the…

A study compared the types of information included in English narratives written by monolingual American students, English narratives by bilingual Mexican students, and Spanish narratives by monolingual Mexican students, and possible differences by grade level. Subjects were in six groups: monolingual (English-speaking) American; bilingual…

Two related studies investigated (1) the extent to which native language input to five Japanese children was varied based on the children's age, and (2) the effectiveness of adult Japanese second language input to a three-year-old American child during a one-month period in Japan. In the first study, interactions of adult-child dyads were compared…

Problems inherent in the holistic scoring of essay examinations written by limited-English-speakers are examined, particularly in the context of one California state college in which English writing skills, holistically assessed, are required for graduation. These problems include lack of interrater reliability, raters' perceptions of their role,…

With the idea of providing a valid conditioning and testing situation by which the student's self-confidence and effectiveness in communicating in a foreign language could be improved, this study evaluates a pilot project designed to identify and measure the effects of having a native speaker in the classroom for a period of time as opposed to a…

Presents evidence contradicting previous findings regarding the relative academic superiority of recent Mexican immigrants over native-born Mexican Americans. Discusses the problem of the relative achievement levels of the two groups in the context of three possible explanations: socio-economic differences; teacher expectancy effect; and native…

A study investigated: (1) the communication strategies (CSs) used by Turkish learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) when interacting with native English speakers, and (2) the influence of gender on use of CSs when communication difficulties occur because of limited English proficiency. Subjects were ten native Turkish-speaking ESL learners…

A study compared the perceptions of two experts from different cultural backgrounds concerning salience of a variety of errors typical of the English written by Hong Kong secondary and college students. A book on English error types written by a Hong-Kong born, fluent Chinese-English bilingual linguist was analyzed for its emphases, and a list of…

A study investigated whether adult learners of a second language would judge grammaticality differently in visual and aural judgment tasks. Four groups were tested: English first-language, French first-language, English second-language, and French second-language. Results indicate judgments were slower and less accurate in the aural condition,…

This study investigated the degree of communicative competence of 8-year-old (n=45) students in five Welsh language immersion programs or Welsh-medium schools, comparing the children's skills with those of 10 native Welsh-speaking children. All were asked to retell a story show previously on video, and to participate in a group discussion task. In…

A study comparing the request strategies of native and non-native speakers of English and Spanish is reported. Subjects were 29 American and 78 European students with varied first languages, enrolled in English and Spanish courses at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Data were obtained using a general background questionnaire and a…

A study was conducted at an American university to collect data on how native English-speaking students asked questions in class. The data were analyzed for use of syntactic forms, formulaic expressions or prefatory comments, terms of address, functions fulfilled by the questions, and politeness markers. The results were then compared with the…

This report presents a description and evaluation of the MacMagic Program, a computer-facilitated core program in language arts and social studies in its fourth year of operation at Davidson Middle School in San Rafael, California. The program consists of two sixth- and two seventh-grade classrooms that use computers and cooperative learning…