A planned 3-year joint project of the Nordic research council for the humanities that focuses on writing development in school-age children is described. Four Nordic countries are involved in the project: Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In the study, discourse-level performance analyses of student writing in English as a Second Language are…

Foreign language (FL) needs is a new interdisciplinary area of research developing between applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational planning and evaluation. FL needs consist of the demands, wishes, and expectations of the whole society, its groups and individuals, reflecting the relationship of their contemporary and future existence…

A major implication in the communicative approach to the teaching of foreign languages concerns classroom interaction in which students should participate. Ideally, this interaction should be identical to interaction in real-life communication situations that students will encounter. A prerequisite for determining whether these situations are in…

The serious student of language, English or foreign, and especially the future language teacher must receive a solid training not only in theoretical but also in applied syntax. Such a course should be offered at the advanced level and deal with the syntax of the language involved in a rigorously systematic way. The search for a systematic, yet…

To determine the usefulness of cohesion frequency analysis in differentiating proficiency in the oral and written composition of English as a second language (ESL) learners, 22 adult learners of ESL were asked to write and tell a story. After transcription, the data were analyzed by holistic evaluation, cohesion form and frequency count, and error…

TRUE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY CAN BE ACHIEVED ONLY BY THE INTERNALIZATION OF THE ENTIRE GRAMMAR OF THE TARGET LANGUAGE PLUS THE DEVELOPMENT OF SKILL IN SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION. ADHERENCE TO EITHER OF THE METHODOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS THAT UNDERLIE TODAY'S AUDIOLINGUALLY-ORIENTED PROGRAMS WILL LEAD STUDENTS TO NOTHING MORE THAN A LEARNING PLATEAU.…

THIS ANNOTATED REFERENCE LIST IS A COMPANION VOLUME TO "PART 1, TEXTS, READERS, DICTIONARIES, TESTS," AND FOLLOWS THE SAME FORMAT. THE FIRST SECTION, BACKGROUND MATERIALS, COVERS TEXTS IN LINGUISTICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, BIBLIOGRAPHIES, AND PERIODICALS. THE SECOND SECTION, METHODOLOGY, COVERS LANGUAGE TEACHING IN GENERAL, PREPARATION AND…

This is the second of two volumes of working papers produced by working groups of the National Congress on Languages in Education. The papers in this volume are concerned with the relationship between the acquisition and teaching of the native language and the learning and teaching of other languages. The papers included are the following: (1)…

Six conference papers, presented first in Italian and then in English, are collected in this booklet. They are: "International Comprehension through Education" by H.R. Light, "The Prelingual Period in Foreign Language Learning" by Djoraje Kostic, "Reconciling Old and New Methods of Language Teaching" by Derrick Plant, "The Use of the Language…

A survey of the substance of linguistics and of the activities of linguists is presented in an attempt to acquaint ordinary readers with the various aspects of la"guage. A discussion of the human tendency toward speech, of the traits of language, and of phonetic elements prepares the way for an analysis of the structure of languag e in terms of…

The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…

The 1971 and 1972 summer Institutes in Adult Basic Education-TESOL (ABE-TESOL) held at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee are described. The purpose of the institutes was to train experienced teachers of adults who speak either a foreign language or a nonstandard dialect of English and who have achieved the educational equivalence of eighth…

A linguistic study of syntactic differences in the mass noun-count noun contrast in French and English reveals the problems encountered in the construction of illustrative sentences and other pattern drills. A definitional statement of the distinctions between the two classes of nouns includes numerous examples in both languages. By taking…

This article discusses innovations in the teaching of French to German-speaking Swiss students at the primary level, based on a structural approach. Phonemics and morphology are explained, as well as the stress placed on the primary of aural comprehension and oral exercises. Word-by-word construction of sentences is eschewed and is replaced by…

This study tests three aspects of the problem of validity of contrastive analysis as a means for predicting errors or problems for second language learners: the constancy of foreign-language errors, the objectivity of the methods and procedures of contrastive analysis, and the capacity of contrastive analysis to make accurate predictions. Japanese…