Understanding spontaneous speech is a very difficult task for many foreign students. They must be taught to use all the ethnographic cues available to enable them to predict the likely content of a text. They must predict not only the factual content of spoken language but also the interactional structuring. (Author/CFM)

Proponents of the cognitive approach to language teaching list linguistic competence as the primary instructional objective and attribute considerable importance to listening comprehension. For the student, linguistic competence would be knowledge of grammatical components of the language and its vocabulary. Understanding oral messages is an…

The conference proceedings include the opening address, plenary session papers, workshop reports, a final forum and address, and the conference program and participant list. The plenary session papers include: "What Are We Doing in Modern Languages Today?"; "Communicative Skills and the Modern Languages Degree"; "The Place of Spoken Language in…