This paper describes situational Navajo language immersion programs, explaining that situational classrooms recreate a situation in which students need Navajo to communicate and noting that Navajo is a very verb centered language. Situational Navajo takes many of the recurring situations in the school and family setting and makes them the core of…

This article attempts to offer insights on how to facilitate student-student interaction in the science classroom. These insights derive from two sources, one from the education literature and the other from the linguistics literature. From the pedagogic sciences, cooperative learning offers a means of understanding what helps groups of students…

Discusses the speech act approach and its usefulness in conveying the meaning of the imperative both for the native speaker and for the purpose of language acquisition. Analyses the infinitival construction of German-language advertising slogans and describes its potential for conveying a variety of messages. (Author/MES)

Evidence is provided to refute the suggestion, made by Macnamara et al. (1976), that four-year-old children perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce indirect implications. It is argued that children use past knowledge plus additional premises to derive indirect…

Presents a rebuttal to Hidi and Hildyard's (1976) criticism of Macnamara et al.'s (1976) assertion regarding the ability of four-year-old children to grasp implicatives and presuppositions. (AM)

Discusses hybrid verbs as a linguistic product of the anglophone cultural influence on the Spanish spoken by Cubans in southeastern Florida. (NCR)

This article reports on a study designed to obtain data on the first words understood and produced by eight infants. It provides a descriptive account of the earliest levels of language comprehension and allows comparison of lexical development in comprehension and production. (Author/CFM)

Audiolingual and translation exercises are presented that were designed to correct syntax of junior high school French language students. The exercises were given to eliminate translating the present progressive and the imperfect word for word, and to develop more awareness of reflexive construction and the imperfect tense. (SW)

Examined children's generalization of familiar verbs to novel events. Findings reveal children aged 1;8 with the largest expressive vocabulary generalized the same verbs to actions with different agents, but not to actions different in outcome or manner of action and children aged 2;2 extended familiar action verbs to other actions different in…

Four ideas for French language classroom activities are described: an exercise in listening to popular songs; a film scenario rewriting exercise; a technique for teaching the subjunctive mood; and a paired or small-group activity to enhance understanding of advertising. (MSE)

Reviews data on the acquisition of German without formal instruction by native speakers of Korean, Turkish, Italian, and German, on the acquisition of French by English speakers, and of the acquisition of English by speakers of various first languages (L1). Evidence indicates that the sole projections that the learner transfers from the L1 are…

Tests the understanding of French pronominal-verbal constructions on native and English speakers of French and assesses their sensitivity to the possible multiple readings such as: reflexive, reciprocal, intrinsic, and passive. The article attributes the superior performance of English speakers to the corresponding morphosyntactic and lexical…

Investigates adult second language learners' processing of English syntactically ambiguous sentences in which a prepositional phrase is interpreted as either a noun phrase or verb phrase attachment. Results reveal lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and contextual constraints on processing ambiguous sentences. (87 references) (Author/CK)

Presents a case study of the English of early missionaries operating in South Africa. The study characterizes the interlanguages of some German and Dutch missionaries, points out the disparity between the usage patterns found in missionary letters and modern linguists' characterizations of their abilities, and suggests missionary English as an…

Discusses the development and content of Verbochip, a computer assisted language-learning program for learning the use and formation of English verbs and tenses. Outlines the main features of the program's "a la carte" environment, including learning strategies employed and the program's linguistic completeness and didactic accuracy.…