Describes research findings from a three-year curriculum research and development project involving developing English language materials for science education students at Ains Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Materials concentrate on comprehension skills of listening and reading and are taught by a cassette tape player in conjunction with…

Explains that the speech compressor/expander is a piece of electronic equipment useful in second language learning laboratories. Considering the relationship between technology and its use as an aid in achieving fluency in comprehension, the theory of rate alteration in second language learning is supported as a viable tool to enhance any…

Discusses the process of native language learning and explores the relationship between it and second language learning. It is suggested that in a language curriculum, the initial emphasis should be on receptive skills. Accuracy, appropriateness, and fluency in communication are discussed, as well as instructional modes for training in these…

Suggests reasons why beginning second-language students try to translate into their primary language as they listen, even though this strategy is recognized as problematical, and proposes some teaching techniques to avoid their adopting it. (22 references) (GLR)

Ways in which the language laboratory may supplement classroom recitations of university students in the intermediate level of English as a foreign language at Bar Ilan University in Israel are presented here. The goal is to increase reading comprehension for bibliographies in students' major courses of study. (CHK)

Reading comprehension is an important means of increasing the learners' involvement. Texts should be used as stretches of real language rather than broken down into isolated units. In teaching foreign languages to non-language students, care should be taken in selecting, analyzing and presenting texts. (SC)

Describes a strategy for guessing meanings from context and suggests ways of practicing this strategy. The strategy involves four steps: (1) determining the part of speech of the word, (2) looking at the immediate grammar, (3) studying the wider context (usually the conjunction relationships), and (4) guessing the word and checking the guess.…

A self-instructional technique for developing listening fluency in foreign language laboratories is reported. (RM)

Outlines some applications of Natural Language Processing, the capacity of computers to process human language, to language teaching. The role of syntactic parsing (the assigning of grammatical structure to sentences by computer) and semantically based processing is examined. (Author/SED)

Presenting minimal pairs in context to the student of English as a foreign language requires him to discriminate between two phonemes that may sound the same. Methodology for student exercises with minimal sentences is presented. (SW)

Discusses research supporting the contention that listening fluency should be taught first and oral response delayed because languaqe acquisition takes place without any overt performance. Includes extensive bibliographic references. (PMJ)

Argues that sufficient adaptivity in computer-assisted language learning materials for individual study can be achieved only if such programs are able to perform meaningful error analysis and fit the needs of individual learners. Other effective elements of the program include collecting information on learning and performance histories of…

Describes an experiment whose principal aim was to examine how a classroom silent period, devoted almost exclusively to aural comprehension, operates. In the case of the French adult learners of English involved in this study, 60 hours proved to be a satisfactory period. (SED)

Describes how computer software captures and makes available for auditory observation and learning the variety of sound shapes that words take on in fast speech. A case study illustrates a teaching procedure that can aid learners' perception and comprehension of fast speech in a foreign language and calls for electronic publication of standard…

A test comparing two groups of beginning learners of English as a second language shows that teaching listening comprehension accompanied by prescribed gestures - "total physical response" - instead of speech production, provides better language acquisition than conventional methods, as well as less anxiety and higher motivation for…