Work supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education to the University of Hawaii. (RS)

The article describes particular structural aspects of German which are likely to cause difficulties for Polish-speaking learners. (Text is in German.) (DH)

Three studies compared development of orthographic representations in children learning to read English, French, and Spanish, using nonsense words rhyming with real words, similar in phonology only, or unlike real words. Results are interpreted in terms of the level of phonology represented in the orthographic recognition units being developed by…

This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a "natural" order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated…

Systematic and chance similarities between Thai and English are illustrated and discussed. The argument is made that a comparative analysis, which highlights the systematic similarities underlying the two languages, is as important in second language pedagogy as the more commonly found contrastive analysis. (Text is in Thai.) (Author/KM)

This is a collection of 60 essays on dialectology written in the period from 1942 to 1979. The essays fall into the categories of theoretical, applied, and critical dialectology. Some of the more recent titles include: "System and Variety in American English,""Dialect Differences and Social Differences in an Urban…

The present paper, a general survey of modern foreign language teaching as it is influenced by applied linguistics, discusses some of the outstanding works and foremost theories in the areas of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, programmed instruction, and contrastive analysis. In discussing the methodology involved in foreign language teaching,…

Challenges the notion that linguistic units which are equivalent from the point of view of being translated with ease from one language to another have a common deep structure. This notion is not seen as feasible in a transformational generative framework. (CLK)

Follow up to a previous study of the use of "por" and "para," this study analyzes "ser,""estar," and "haber" for lexical selection in relation to their functions and also for errors in tense, mode, aspect, agreement, and invented forms and uses of copula in simplified or reduced utterances. Data were from 20 oral examinations of Peace Corps…

A linguistic approach to language acquisition is based on two tenets: the workings of language must be studied through grammatical analysis and psycholinguistic experimentation, and understanding how a particular language is acquired requires cross-linguistic comparative research. Illustrates these tenets, discussing dative alternation in…

Contrastive analysis a priori predicts facts of possible errors in learning a second language that contrastive analysis a posteriori cannot explain. In a study of relative clause formation, the latter approach shows that students have no trouble, whereas the former approach shows the task to be so difficult that they avoid it. (AG)

The experimental research of two linguists studying the grammaticality judgments of second language learners, in which the researchers tried to find evidence that second language learners can discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences on principles of universal grammar, is examined and compared with the results of studies arguing…