This paper will deal, firstly, with the South African context, that cries out for attention to responsible language assessment. The renewed interest in language testing in South Africa is well illustrated in assessments of language ability for educational purposes generally, and more specifically in the assessment of academic literacy. Secondly,…

This article describes a procedure to aid in the clinical appraisal of child speech. The approach, based on the work by Dinnsen, Chin, Elbert, and Powell (1990; Some constraints on functionally disordered phonologies: Phonetic inventories and phonotactics. "Journal of Speech and Hearing Research", 33, 28-37), uses a railway idiom to track gains in…

Rapid advances in computing have enabled the integration of corpora into language teaching and learning, yet in China corpus methods have not yet been widely adopted. Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts aims to advance the state of the art in the use of corpora in applied linguistics and contribute to the expertise in corpus use in China.

It is a good thing for the field of applied linguistics to adopt experimental methods of research where appropriate and to think more in terms of testable models of second language processing. However, there is a threat of psycholinguistics becoming the parent discipline, most likely temporary, of applied linguistics. This would be unwise for two…

GENERATIVE THEORY NOW DOMINATES MACHINE TRANSLATION AND HAS BEGUN TO TAKE OVER THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN THE SCHOOLS, AS ONE PUBLISHER AFTER ANOTHER COMES OUT WITH A TRANSFORMATIONALLY-ORIENTED SERIES OF TEXTBOOK FOR HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH. THE AUTHOR FEELS, HOWEVER, THAT THE EFFECTS OF THIS THEORY ON LANGUAGE TEACHING HAVE BEEN NEGLIGIBLE…

This test was constructed to determine individual reaction to various linguistic principles and implications. The test consists of 170 "agree-disagree" items: 106 statements of principle (e.g., "The function of a dictionary is not to prescribe rules on how a language should operate, but simply to record what people say and write") and 64 practical…

This bibliography lists books, articles, papers, theses and dissertations describing English-Polish contrastive studies conducted in Poland. There are 403 works listed in both languages, divided into two groups: General Works and English-Polish Contrastive Studies. (CHK)

This volume is one in a series of studies in linguistics that is intended to supplement the "International Review of Applied Linguistics." Discourse analysis, or looking at language as text in context, is presented in the first chapter. This is correlated with what is known about the differences between languages in a second chapter on contrastive…

Six papers on Irish English are presented. "The Study of Hiberno-English" (Jeffrey L. Kallen) surveys some aspects of research on the language and offers a historical context for the subsequent papers. "A Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English in Its Context" (T. M. Tilling) reports on the early stages of an island-wide survey…

The papers in this volume are all phonological in nature, and all but one of them are written within the framework of Optmality Theory. This volume includes work on a variety of languages: American Indian (Kiowa, Koasati, Shoshoni), Austronesian (Muna and Nancowry), Bantu (Tsonga), and Indo European (English and Spanish). The following articles…

In this final stage of a series of three linguistic studies conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, four topics are presented. The longest is a study of consonant gemination in German, Spanish, French, and American English from acoustic, perceptual, and radiographic points of view. Pharyngeal features are studied in the…

This document includes the abstracts of papers presented at a seminar intended to provide a survey of how the models and techniques of linguistics may be applied to the description of the German language, with a view to improving the understanding of some of the practical problems of first and second language learning. Topics range over a wide…

The purpose of this paper is to show that: (1) language universals have much to offer to students of contrastive linguistics, and (2) in order to make contrastive analysis more meaningful, one ought to go beyond cataloguing mere contrastive structure statements and capture underlying structural tendencies. Some characteristics of word order in…

This booklet forms a part of the Hungarian-English Contrastive Linguistics Project which is concerned with investigating the differences and similarities between these two languages with implications for second language acquisition. The papers here deal with the Hungarian writing system. Initial remarks concern the relationship between script and…

This collection of articles written over a period of 10 years concerning the transformational syntax of English has been divided into six sections. The articles in the first section provide background material for the reader with no specialized linguistic preparation. They present the fundamental questions that linguists are now asking, some of…