It is proposed that student motivation can be maintained and enhanced when teachers combine authentic oral and written language with activities leading the student to identify with sympathetic individuals in the target culture. Suggested activities, emphasizing language training at the intermediate level, include interviewing native speakers, work…

Characteristics and reading performance of students who have a dominant language other than English are examined and compared with those of English-dominant students, based on the results 1979-1980 National Assessment of Educational Progress (reading and literature). Responses were obtained from 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. The…

The materials status report for Uigur, a Turkic language spoken in the Sinkiang-Uigur Autonomous Region in northwest China and in the Soviet Socialist Republics of Kazakh and Uzbek, is one of a series intended to provide the nonspecialist with a picture of the availability and quality of texts for teaching various languages to English speakers.…

This volume of papers reports the fieldwork and linguistic analysis done on K'ekchi, a Mayan language spoken by about 500,000 people in the departments of Alta Verapaz and Peten in Guatemala as well as in the southern part of Belize. The work was done by five anthropology and linguistics graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin with…

The normal sequence of development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish-speaking children, two to five years old, was studied to determine the syntactic structures and range of language variability at each chronological age level. Middle-class children, living in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of…

The autonomous learning strategy for adults which has been used to teach English as a second language at the University of Nancy for the past two years is described here in detail. Several case studies are provided on learners with both specific and general language needs, illustrating the roles of the helper, learner and the institution, and the…

Bilingual education is defined here as instruction in two languages, one of which is English as a second language, and the other the native language of the pupils. Bilingual education is also noted to include a cultural component whereby students are taught about the history and culture of their own civilization as well as those of their adopted…

This final report details the objectives of the institute, operation of the program, and conclusions concerning the entire project. A description of program operation includes specific discussion of: (1) planning, (2) participants, (3) staff, (4) orientation, (5) program operation, and (6) evaluation. The appendix encompasses: (1) brochure and…

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…

A study of the interlanguage pragmatics of learners of Hebrew and English (L2s) focuses on pragmatic indicators used in requests and apologies (situations in Appendix). Deviations from native-speaker norms in the speech of non-native speakers are discussed. Results suggest L2s' misuse of pragmatic indicators can have serious interactional…

This study investigates the effects of regular, one-to-one conversations with a native speakers of English on the writing skills of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) college students. The subjects, three undergraduate students (ages 18 to 23) in the ESL program of a small college, participated in standard conversational English with a native…

The lives of many families involve contact with more than one language and culture on a daily basis. This book is aimed at the many parents and professionals who feel uncertain about the best way to go about helping children gain maximum benefit from the situation. Every family's situation is different, but there is much parents can do to make…

Describes features of articulatory shortcuts discovered among middle class, educated native speakers of Spanish in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. It is maintained that these features should be taught to students of Spanish in order that they may understand colloquial Spanish speech. (AM)

An exploration of the effectivenes of college overseas study programs on improvement of foreign language skills addresses student motivation, academic expectations, curricular changes, language pledge requirements, communication with native speakers, and the purpose and image of study abroad programs. Suggestions are made for improving…

In this study, native speakers assessed 30 students' gain in Spanish skills over a seven-week period of study in Mexico. Results indicate that 22 improved significantly in some aspect of Spanish. Students, especially beginners, who reported more informal interactive contact showed greater gain; beginning and advanced students reporting more…