This book is intended to help Vietnamese people who have recently arrived in this country. It provides phrases the refugees will need in their initial contacts with Americans. The subject matter provides some basic facts about the U.S. and the way Americans live, and covers as wide a range as possible of the situations that the Vietnamese will…

This paper focuses on parents' attitudes about their children's maintenance of their native language (L1). It is part of an inter-nordic study of immigrant languages between generation one and generation two, that interviewed 276 parents of North American, Finnish, Turkish, and Vietnamese origin, residing in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden.…

This collection of papers assesses the validity of the MLAT. It is not self-evident that a test designed for English speaking university students in America and validated there is necessarily valid in an English university. The differences between American English and British English are evident, and American universities admit a greater…

This paper discusses in a general way the decline of use of the Romanian language among second and third-generation Romanian-Americans, and then it points to the state of the study of English as a foreign language in the Romanian Socialist Republic today. A brief review of the influence of British English in Romania is followed by: (1) a more…

This paper discusses the need for foreign language students to develop positive attitudes about regional and social dialect variation, while learning dialectal patterns that will best facilitate their widest acceptance into a community of target language speakers. The latter issue was tested in a study in which native speakers of American English…

It is suggested that the static model of language which is prerequisite for contrastive analysis is inadequate in pinpointing potential difficulties in second language learning. The student learning graphemic-phonetic correspondences encounters two types of difficulties not exposed by contrastive analysis: dialectal difficulties and reading…

A study investigated attitudes of 132 Austrian university students of English toward three native English accents (standard British, near-standard British, American) and two Austrian non-native accents. Results confirm non-native accents' low status, and indicate personal preference for whichever accent is most familiar from overseas visits. Most…

An ongoing series of studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign concerning cross-cultural interpretation of implicature in conversation is discussed. Implicature is defined as the process of making inferences about the meaning of an utterance in the context in which it occurs. The studies focus on non-native speakers' (NNSs')…

This paper describes an interactive exchange program used at Eastern Kentucky University that involves face-to-face interaction between international, non-native English speakers and native English speakers in (1) social work classes at the university, (2) a nursing home, (3) an alternative school, and (4) a local high school. In the social work…

The study described here investigated the refusal strategies of intermediate-level second language learners and the potential for developing sociolinguistic competence in nonnative speakers (NNS) through classroom instruction. Subjects were six college students of English as a Second Language, divided into treatment and control groups. The…

This survival English text is written for Indochinese, sixteen years old and over, who do not have the very basic listening and speaking skills needed for living in America. The lessons are designed to develop a functional listening and speaking vocabulary of approximately 900 words, over an instructional span of nine weeks or less. Reading and…

Studying the lexical borrowing of the Japanese community living in Hawaii inspires several hypotheses in the field of sociolinguistics. The use of borrowed words is a linguistic device to create a new Japanese dialect--Hawaiian Japanese. The borrowed words reflect the process and degree of social and psychological adjustment to the new cultural…

This book is intended for students of English as a second language who have some knowledge of English but who need guidance and intensive structural practice in speaking the language. It contains ten units and provides grammar material for at least a one-semester course at the intermediate level. It is primarily geared to adult students in…

This paper analyzes a study by Fukushima (1990) of the English offers and responses of Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) college students and reports on an experiment designed to address the perceived weaknesses of Fukushima's work. Fukushima's study found that many Japanese EFL learners could not use appropriate levels of politeness in…

This study investigated the effects of interference of a native dialect in the acquisition of a second dialect. Four groups of subjects were used: Five white preschool children from an intergrated nursery school, five Black preschool children from a Head Start program, five white, middle-class 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds, and five Black 16-, 17-,…