A study investigated differences in the speech styles used in making requests among five native speakers of Japanese (JJ), five American learners of Japanese (AJ), and Americans speaking English (AE) and their implications for intercultural communication. All subjects were adults. Data were elicited in role-plays of a scenario including the…

A study compared the topical structure (TS) of Arabic and English in order to determine whether Arab learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) transfer potential differences between Arabic and English in their English writing, or whether they use an altogether different TS indicative of developmental factors. Four sets of data were compared…

A study of essays on a single topic (capital punishment) written by 22 American high school students and 30 second-year Japanese college students investigated: cultural differences in organizational patterns in argumentative essays; comparative use of rational and affective appeals; differences in content of rational and affective appeals;…

This paper considers four levels of analysis in the observation of the prosodic features of pause in speech: phonetic; syntactic; semantic; and informative. On the phonetic level, a pause is related to length and intonation, and intonation in turn, being a result of the speaker's meaning, constitutes an expression of his/her emotional state. On…

The educational and linguistic rationales for designing an adult English-as-a-Second-Language literacy program based on phonics are discussed, with specific reference to an Ibibio adult literacy program in Nigeria. An introductory section gives an overview of Nigerian policy and practice concerning literacy education. Next, the phonics approach to…

Revised texts of five papers from a conference on Dutch applied linguistics are presented. "Learning a Foreign Language in a Natural Acquisition Context Without Instruction" (Wolfgang Klein) advocates observing and analyzing language learning in progress in natural language learning contexts and presents data from a European project on…

The validity of the theory of crucial similarity in language interference is investigated. The theory proposes that when a first and a second language are structurally similar in some aspects, the second language learner will assume similarity in other aspects, causing interference. In this study, the German of first grade students whose teacher…

A discussion of classroom techniques and activities useful in teaching English to monolingual Arab students begins with a review of cultural factors significant in the second language learning patterns of this population. These factors include historical and traditional influences, North American perceptions of Arabs, the teaching of English in…

The phonological switching processes of 16 bilingual (Spanish-English) adults were observed to provide phonological evidence for the coordinate/compound theory of bilingualism. Each subject was categorized as a coordinate or compound based on responses to a questionnaire. Subjects were recorded reading a mixed list of Spanish and English words.…

THIS PAPER WAS SUBMITTED TO THE BUREAU OF CURRICULUM RESEARCH OF THE NEW YORK CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION FOR THEIR USE IN PREPARING A MANUAL FOR LANGUAGE ARTS SKILLS IN GRADES 5 TO 12. THE SUGGESTIONS HERE GREW OUT OF THE AUTHORS' ATTEMPTS "TO ISOLATE THE STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE VERNACULAR USED IN URBAN GHETTOS AND THE…

A young Spanish woman was given 82 hours of individual instruction in English. Her exposure to and use of English were confined to these lessons. The subject acquired adjective-noun ordering and regular plural relatively quickly; possessor-possessed ordering and genitive relatively slowly; the definite article all at once after a period of…

This investigation examined the acquisition of five complex English syntactic structures by Egyptian and Israeli adult learners at different levels of proficiency. Carol Chomsky's methodology, as adapted by d'Anglejan and Tucker, served to assess comprehension of these structures. The responses of the Egyptians and Israelis, which were similar to…

This selective bibliography is divided into 2 main sections. The first deals with Thai-English contrastive studies and lists 3 books, or sections in books, and 11 journal articles. The second section deals with error analysis for Thai speakers learning English and lists 2 journal articles. The entries range in date from 1955 to 1974. The books…

This report describes work on a pilot system for a fully automatic, high-quality translation of German scientific and technical text into English and gives the results of an experiment designed to show the system's capability to produce quality mechanical translation. The areas considered were: (1) grammar formalism, mainly involving the addition…

This paper addresses itself to the question of why the English language should have levelled almost all of its inflections, and what the relationship is between the breakdown of the case system and the rise of fixed word-order, prepositional phrases, and verb periphrases. The explanation proposed for the phenomenon of syntactic drift is considered…