Suggests that within the context of the Air Expedition Force, the United States Air Force must validate language skills and change current policies and practices to meet new, more dynamic requirements. Recommends a fresh look at language skills, especially for officers. (Author/VWL)

Examines the performance and perceptions of 100 university-level learners of French as a foreign language, with a view toward exposing the impact of social pressure in the learning environment. Addresses the contradictory nature of learners' perceptions of what it means to "sound good" when speaking French. (Author/VWL)

Reports the steps and findings of a mini-action research study conducted by a Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center language teacher. Focused on how this teacher varied classroom activities. Participants were U.S. military personnel studying Turkish at the advanced beginner level. (Author/VWL)

Stresses the importance of the inner voice in second language (L2) learning and, in particular, its potentially valuable role in interaction with sensory images and affective impulses in creating mental representations of the world. Outlines characteristics and functions of first language inner voice by reference to a corpus of inner voice…

Drawing on research from the field of communication, this article proposes a framework that identifies, classifies, and organizes foreign language teachers' nonverbal behavior. It describes an observational study in which each nonverbal behavior in the framework is defined and illustrated as it occurs in a foreign language class. (Author/VWL)

Addresses the issue of the reliability of grammaticality judgment tests and explores what it is that they measure (i.e., their construct validity). Various methods of examining their reliability demonstrate that the grammaticality judgment tests used in this study had relatively low reliability. (Author/VWL)

This article reviews a high quality Internet site called The Perseus Project, which serves as a remarkable entry page to the exploration of Greek, Latin, and the ancient classical world. (Author/VWL)

Discusses Web browsers and how their capabilities have been expanded, support for Web browsing on different devices (cell phones, palmtop computers, TV sets), and browser support for the next-generation Web authoring language, XML ("extensible markup language"). (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the noticing hypothesis in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) reading materials. Reviews the problem of assessing noticing in classroom and experimental settings through conditions for noticing, retrospective assessment, and concurrent assessment. Concurrent assessment is illustrated through CALL materials that gather data on…

Describes a computer assisted word acquisition program (CAVOCA) that tries to operationalize current theoretical thinking about second language vocabulary acquisition. Its contents are based on a systematic inventory of the vocabulary relevant for the target group. To test its efficacy, the program was contrasted in a number of experimental…

Investigates discourse functions and syntactic complexity in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learner output obtained via two different modes of computer-mediated communication (CMC): asynchronous and synchronous discussions. Two instructors and twenty-five students from two advanced ESL writing classes participated in this study. (Author/VWL)

Fifty intermediate second language Spanish learners were asked to carry out networked discussions in pairs during their lab time using a synchronous chat program that records all textual entries. Findings suggest that computer mediated communication (CMC) can provide many of the alleged benefits ascribed to the Interaction Hypothesis, but with…

This collection of papers includes the following: "Preface: The Acquisition of Celtic Languages" (Jeffrey L. Kallen); "The Development of Finiteness in Early Welsh" (Robert D. Borsley and Bob Morris Jones); "Acquiring Subject and Object Relatives; Evidence from Irish" (Helen Goodluck, Eithne Guilfoyle, and Sile Harrington); "The Language…

Investigates the role in learning of rote-learned formulas or chunks. Data were examined from a longitudinal study of 16 child beginner classroom learners of French for occurrences of three chunks, against which definitional criteria were tried out. These forms were then tracked for two years to chart their breakdown and explore their contribution…

Investigated the relationships among three types of vocabulary knowledge (passive, controlled active, and free active) within the same individuals, taking four variables into consideration: passive vocabulary size, language learning context, second (L2) for foreign (FL), length of residence in L2 context, and, among the Canadians, knowledge of…