Describes Spanish practicum course at Lewis and Clark College in which students of Spanish act as English tutors for Spanish-speaking individuals on campus and in the community. Students benefit culturally and linguistically and Spanish curriculum is enhanced. (Author/BK)

Considers ways to diagnose and group ESL (English as a Second Language) students for writing instruction that is based on sentence combining. Suggests available materials to use with this technique, and offers specific examples of the use of sentence combining to generate prenominal adjectives and relative clauses. (RL)

An experiment was conducted at Bentley College (Massachusetts) using native-speaking peer tutors to help foreign language students. The experiment met with some success, however, it is noted that, for major universities, the logistics of administrating thousands of tutor-student meetings is a substantial hurdle. (GLR)

This study investigated whether undergraduate non-native speakers of English had difficulties comprehending information in a science lecture whose discourse organization went beyond a basic problem-solution structure. It found that the comprehension difficulties of the non-native speakers were also found among many of the native speakers. (25…

Based on findings from an ethnographic study conducted in South Korea, recommends that when working with non-native speakers, native speakers: be patient, emphasize vowel sounds, avoid over-enunciation, utilize phenomenological bracketing, minimize use of metaphors and idioms, and avoid using intonation to convey meaning. (EV)

Discusses a new Spanish program for heritage language speakers at Peace College in North Carolina. While most programs designed for native speakers have been implemented in large institutions near a strong Hispanic community, the efforts at Peace College show how a program can be effectively developed even in a small women's college with a…

To investigate the relationship between speech and meaning, a word recognition study was conducted that required 20 beginning learners of Chinese to pronounce and later identify in English 46 Chinese words. The correlational analysis indicated a significant relationship between being able to pronounce and being able to identify Chinese words.…

Through sequential analysis of actual interactions, describes real-world discourse activities performed by competent native and nonnative speakers of English to handle complex academic tasks. Using data from a graduate seminar, details two interactional resources exercised by the seminar participants in the doing of disagreement and critique.…

In this pilot study looking at interlanguage prosody, normal, and contrastively focused constructions in English were collected from four English-as-a-first-language speakers and four Japanese-as-a-first-language speakers. These productions were then played to six native English speakers to see how well they could identify the stress placement of…

This article stresses the need for improved Spanish instruction in Spanish and Latin American universities for Spanish-speaking students. Obstacles to teaching such as student apathy and professional shortcomings are outlined. Suggestions for improved curriculum content and methodology are given. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Presents the results of three experiments designed to test the acoustic scanning hypothesis for reading in a number of ways and to look at the cross-out procedure as a test of syntactic processing. (RB)

The performance of two groups of non-native English speakers on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and an appropriate verbal aptitude test was examined. One group of graduate applicants took both TOEFL and the verbal section of the Aptitude Test of the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). Another group of undergraduate applicants…

Overlapping samples of 191, 142, and 87 undergraduates rated pairs of sentences for the frequency and acceptability of the syntactic constructions represented to investigate the feasibility of using such ratings in the study of syntactic forms. The results indicated that subjects are consistent in their judgments of both the frequency and…

Data from undergraduates' ratings of the frequency and acceptability of selected syntactic constructions are analyzed for linguistically defined sets. Mean ratings of frequency and acceptability as well as the results from a cluster analysis of each set of sentences are given for seven target contrasts: active/passive, may/might, perfect/past,…

This paper responds to Claire Kramsch's essay on the demise of the notion of the idealized native speaker as the model for second language learning and implications for second languages and cultures education. Focusing on French, this paper suggests that it is not certain whether the elevation of the native speaker model ever was as real or…