With its focus on simplification universals, developmental orders, teachability, and functional-grammatical bases for acquisition, the well-known research on German (L2) language acquisition has contributed much to SLA research in general. At the same time, sociolinguistic investigations focus squarely on the difficult social conditions that…

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge--orthography, syntax, association, grammatical…

This study compared the narratives of three groups of advanced speakers of Spanish with different learning backgrounds. The first group was made up of heritage speakers; the second group was composed of missionaries that had recently returned from a two-year sojourn in a Spanish-speaking country; and the third group comprised students who had…

This study argues that positive second-language (L2) data do not necessarily rule out inappropriate L2 grammar. Rather, L2 learners appear to postulate first-language (L1) grammar as an interim theory about the L2, at least in the initial stages of L2 acquisition. The case where L2 grammar intersects L1 concerning time adverbial clauses was chosen…

A study investigated the relationships among language proficiency, learning mode, learning style, abstract reasoning, and age of second language acquisition in 227 adults. The subjects, most of whom were university students, included 17 monolinguals, 120 partial multilinguals, and 90 competent multilinguals. For comparison with competent…

A study of interlanguage comprehension, part of a larger project by the Gothenburg research group, investigated the telephone conversations between advanced learners and native speakers of Swedish. In four of the eight conversations, the non-native speakers called the public library to get information on how to borrow books; in the other four the…

A study investigated the validity of an English listening skills test by comparing the results of native American and British English speakers with those of Dutch students of English as a second language. A hypothesis suggested that two-thirds of the items would test listening skills and the remaining third would test other knowledge. Test results…

A study was carried out to test the hypothesis that a difference exists between the results of a paradigmatic/syntagmatic word association test given in an individual's native language and in his second language. The sample used in this study consists of 23 Iranian officers attending a course at Air University in Alabama. Their primary language is…

The marked increase in the number of Hispanic bicultural students entering American colleges and universities has created new dilemmas for teachers of beginning and intermediate Spanish. In addition to the difficulties occasioned by new cultural perspectives, both student and teacher are faced with the problem of remodeling the classroom program…

Two questions arise from attempts to develop reading comprehension in scientific French: (1) should the concentration be mainly on vocabulary, or on grammar as well, and if so, what aspect of grammar; and (2) should the students' native language be taken into account, and if so, in what way: by translating, or through a systematic comparison of…

The purposes of this study are stated to be twofold: (1) to determine the relative effects of the native language and black dialect influences on the oral English performance of Puerto Rican pupils in mainland schools and (2) to assess the relationship of these sources of linguistic interference with aural ability in English, reading ability in…

Advice on how to obtain a language laboratory is accompanied by observations on how to make language tapes. Flexibility in planning the laboratory, a thorough demonstration of the new laboratory, demonstrations on making tapes, a maintenance program, and the need for periodic servicing of the laboratory are considered vital. The primary function;…

This paper reports on a study in which twenty young adults were tested for their ability to accurately reproduce the articulatory and prosodic features of three non-Indo-European languages in which they had received instruction. The first of two basic goals of this research was to test, at the purely phonetic level, the "critical period for…

Presents the results of a questionnaire (in appendix) that asked 1,388 students to identify their perceptual learning style preferences. Analyses of the questionnaires indicated that nonnative speakers' learning style preferences often differ significantly from those of native speakers. Many variables are related to differences in learning styles…

Summarizes some preliminary findings from research into the nature and effect of various discourse modifications by a native speaker to a language learner. These modifications include (1) idiom avoidance; (2) comprehension checks and pauses; and (3) selection of information. An informal experiment gauging foreign students' impression of…