While there are many difficulties faced by world language educators, both teachers and students of certain languages--languages commonly identified with countries and cultures deemed to be hostile to the United States--often find themselves in uniquely paradoxical situations. This article begins with a brief anecdotal description of the personal…

Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where…

SINCE 1958, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has gathered and analyzed data on undergraduate and graduate course enrollments in languages other than English in United States colleges and universities. The previous survey examined language enrollments in fall 2009; here the MLA presents its twenty-third survey in the series, describing trends…

Total enrollments (undergraduate and graduate) in languages other than English dropped by 9.2% between fall 2013 and fall 2016, as reported in the Modern Language Association's twenty-fifth language enrollment census. Despite the overall drop, there were gains in nearly half of all language programs (45.5%) that mitigate somewhat the downward…

The Basques first immigrated on a large scale to the USA during the Gold Rush of 1848. After immigrating to the USA, they settled in pockets throughout the West, especially in California, Nevada and Idaho, and it is currently estimated that more than 35,000 Basque-Americans live in these three states. This represents one of the largest…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…

This paper reports on two studies that investigated the effectiveness of a contrastive analysis type of pedagogical intervention, which aimed to promote interlanguage development in the use and understanding of English possessive determiners (PDs) among adolescent second language (L2) learners. The first research question asked whether explicit…

Excerpted from a study published by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) pursuant to a contract (No. OEC-0-8-071155-3708) with the U.S. Office of Education. (DS)

The Center for Applied Linguistics, as a part of its tenth anniversary celebration, has undertaken the preparation of a comprehensive report on the language involvement of the United States Government. The first aspect of this study was a survey of instructional materials developed by the Peace Corps since its establishment in 1961. This resulting…

Examines switches produced in spontaneous speech over a period of 15 months by 2 trilingual children acquiring Hebrew, Spanish, and English. The switches were analyzed both grammatically and according to specific sociolinguistic features. (seven references) (VWL)

This report is based on a questionnaire survey directed in spring and fall 1977 to all state foreign language supervisors. In those cases where state totals were not available, questionnaires were sent directly to various school districts. An analysis of the compiled figures showed that in fall 1976, the public secondary schools (PSS) in the 7-12…

Attempts to describe the interpersonal variation in interlanguage tense and aspect systems of four French/Moroccan Arabic learners of second language (L2) Spanish in a natural setting. In addition to noting differences in the way these four learners use L2 verbal morphology to construct their narratives, results also support previous research on…

Reading performance of English children in Grades 1-4 was compared with reading performance of German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, and Finnish speaking children at the same grade levels. Results showed that with the exception of English, psuedowords in the remaining orthographies were read with a high level of accuracy by the end of Grade 1.…

In section I, papers presented at the Hawaii Association of Language Teachers (HALT) in 1993 are presented. Section II includes a number of projects received from a call for papers simultaneous to the call for the HALT papers. Section 1 contains: "This is Like a Foreign Language to Me: Keynote Address" (Bill VanPatten); "From Discussion Questions…

A review of higher education Portuguese language programs explores the characteristics of these programs between 1945 and 1979 and enrollment in the 1980s. A discussion focuses on how recent developments in French and Spanish applied linguistics and new teaching methodologies and materials will affect the future development of such programs. (CB)