Discusses politeness strategies used by native and Dutch speakers of Spanish, contrasting the act of making requests by these two groups of speakers. One of the article's conclusions states that native speakers of Spanish are more direct in their requests, and that nonnative speakers attempt to sound less face-threatening and less offensive. (23…

Discusses the discourse strategies that status-unequal interlocutors use in expressing disagreement. Reveals semantic formulas as influenced by the role relationships and compares and contrasts the discourse strategies used by native speakers of Turkish and American English for the same speech event in order to obtain a cross-culture perspective.…

Describes how an English-as-a-Second-Language program can move as painlessly as possible from conversational to academic English in order to cover the use of English in business, politics, and science. The article focuses on helping students progress in their acquired language, in the absence of native speakers, after the program is over. (12…

Describes an oral Slavey language program that drew on knowledge of the Elders, a traditional source of knowledge and wisdom for language instruction. Describes community action for course and materials development and effective use of political support to develop and establish this community based language renewal program. Contains 21 references.…

Discusses the importance of the cultural component in the language learning process for providing a sound communication base. Examples are presented that reflect differences in speech patterns, such as politeness, of native speakers of British and Moroccan Arabic, with emphasis on culturally specific language patterns. (25 references)(OD)

The advanced phase of the University of Florida's international teaching assistants training program extends the linguistic and pedagogical training of these assistants by concentrating on one-on-one and small group interactions with native speakers. Detailed analysis of videotaped interactions help in the development of strategies for the…

The role of socio-contextual and social psychological elements in second-language acquisition in bilingual settings is examined among 139 native Spanish-speaking secondary school students. Compared to a Basque-speaking control group, the Spanish-speaking students scored lower on subjective ethnolinguistic vitality, social networks, motivation, and…

Discusses the Arabic language and the motivation to acquire the language within the Israeli setting. Examination focuses on the judicial status of Arabic and its communicative functions within the community, linguistic policy of the Israeli political center and the status of Arabic within the educational system, and attitudes toward Arabic and its…

Examined how living outside native-language environments, and subsequent language attrition, affected the language model provided by native speakers teaching English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) in Spain. Surveys indicated that the first language was a changeable system susceptible to the pervasive influence of the second language and to the…

Discusses, in the context of second-language learning, the definition of collocations in English and major approaches to linguistic description of prefabricated language. Presents data from a study comparing use of specific lexical collocations (phrases) by native speakers (based on existing language corpus) and learners of English (data drawn…

Focuses on the performance of South African 12th graders on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), exploring the relationship between student background and mathematics literacy. Teacher data and school background data were not available, but findings show that the most significant performance factors were home language,…

Examines whether negotiation addresses the need of second- language (L2) learners to focus attention on L2 form. The study analyzed the utterances of negotiation produced as 20 English native speaker-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) dyads engaged in communication tasks. Negotiation assisted the NNS needs for data on features that were possible in the…

Analyzes the mental organizations of two sets of fuzzy lexical items by 70 native speakers (NSs) of English and 185 learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Findings suggest that a discernible approximative pattern exists in the acquisition of ESL semantics, with the differentiation of certain words acquired before the differentiation of…

An English for academic purposes needs survey conducted at a Canadian university among first-year Bachelor's and Master's level students reveals native speakers (NS) and nonnative speakers (NNS) of English perceive that the language skills necessary for academic study are of different levels of difficulty. English language difficulties appear to…

Discusses how language teacher education has shifted to constructivist, process-oriented theories of learning; the idea that teacher education programs have failed to prepare teachers for the classroom; the importance of teachers' prior experiences; and the concern that teaching be viewed as a profession where teachers have an active role in…