Asked graduate faculty to provide information about writing requirements of first-year doctoral students, criteria they use to evaluate students' writing, and writing problems of native- and nonnative-English-speaking students. Survey results raise pedagogical issues concerning global versus local writing problems, role of vocabulary instruction,…

A study is reported of how a total of 269 English native speakers and Japanese native speakers at professorial, graduate, and undergraduate levels evaluate and edit English-as-a-Second-Language compositions written by Japanese college students. Factors examined include grammar, clarity of meaning, naturalness, and organization. (44 references)…

Observation and comparison of native speaking and English-as-a-Second-Language students' reading patterns, overall reading comprehension, and comprehension of coreferential pronouns revealed that misunderstanding of coreferential ties reflected a misunderstanding of the descriptive phrases to which the pronouns referred. (22 references) (Author/CB)

Attempts to determine empirically whether English-as-a-Foreign-Language students' understanding of culturally loaded words approximates that of native speakers of English, and how much English-proficiency level may account for the extent of this approximation. The study involved 125 EFL students from a university in China and 61 native-speaker…

Reviews how the second-language learner's mental lexicon in lexical models is treated, summarizes major characteristics of the mental lexicon, discusses the structure of the mental lexicon, and examines a model of lexical acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Examines how native and nonnative undergraduate-student speakers adjust their referring expressions to each other in conversation. Finds that lexical entrainment was just as common in native/nonnative pairs as in native/native pairs; natives uttered more words than nonnatives in the same roles; and native expressions were judged less…

Reports the results of a study on the intonation of 18 Mandarin Chinese speakers lecturing in English. The study investigated the hypothesis that the nonnative speakers who were able to use the intonation system of English most effectively would score higher on a global language test. (Author/JL)

This paper addresses the effect of error correction on second language learning by focusing on feedback and it's effect on language acquisition. The paper deals specifically with the written form of the target language and looks at how the second language teacher can address errors that interfere with written communication in such a way that the…

This study examined the ways in which teachers of English as a second language (ESL) perceive the semantic and syntactic constraints that govern word use and the strategies they use to explain lexical anomalies to students. Twelve native speaking ESL teachers from 2 university-level intensive English programs were asked to identify, categorize,…

A study investigated the individual and interactive effects of both context and familiarity on the reading comprehension of both native English and English as a second language (ESL) readers to see if these two components of background knowledge would interact, and if so, how. Context or lack of it was defined by the presence or absence of a title…

Information on Colorado State University's foreign language camps for college students is presented. Advantages of the following two models for camps are identified: a single language camp, and a combination multi-language camp with four languages (Spanish, French, German, and Chinese). Features of the camps include: speaking in the foreign…

Two prose passeges (one English, one Yoruba) were used as reading texts in a study of 29 undergraduates in the University of Ibadan to determine whether native speakers of Yoruba read English texts faster and more efficiently than they read equivalent texts in Yoruba. Most read Yoruba more slowly than in English. (LBH)

Investigates whether Universal Grammar (UG) is accessible to adult language learners. Advanced Korean adult acquirers of English were given a test of grammaticality judgements on English "wh-" sentences, where the relevant constraints are thought to derive from principles of UG. Clear UG effects were found. Sample instruction sheet given…

Compares the processing of English words by Chinese-English bilinguals with that of monolingual English speakers. Subjects read and rated English words for their contribution to sentence structure and meaning. It was found that bilinguals generally rated English words as contributing more to sentence structure and meaning than did monolinguals.…

This study examined the quality of three English vowels and their Korean counterpart vowels by measuring F1/F2 frequencies and investigating how the different vowel qualities influenced consonant voicing. Participants were six native speakers (NS) of English and six NS of Korean who were graduate students at a large U.S. university. F1/F2…