Wode, Henning (1978). The L1 vs. L2 Acquisition of English Interrogation. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 15. Several recent reports on the untutored second language acquisition of English have suggested that the same developmental sequence holds for the acquisition of the interrogative structures irrespective of whether English is acquired as a first language (L1) or a second language (L2). These studies have been conducted within the Klima & Bellugi (1966) framework worked out for the L1 acquistion of English. New data from four children with German as L1 and acquiring English as L2 naturalistically, i.e., without being tutored, indicate that these results do not hold for every combination in which English is acquired as L2. Furthermore, if the data from the earlier reports are re-analyzed within a more detailed framework than the Klima & Bellugi one, then differences comparable to those found for L2 English/L1 German become apparent. It is concluded that: (1) the L1 acquisition of English questions is different from the L2 acquisition, and (2) the L2 developmental sequences for any language vary systematically as a function of the L1 acquired previously. Descriptors: Bilingualism, Child Language, English, English (Second Language)

Clement, R.; And Others (1977). Attitudes and Motivation in Second Language Acquistion: An Investigation of Ontario Francophones. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 12. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability of a motivational/attitudinal questionnaire developed for use with francophone students, and to assess the relation of attitudes and motivation to achievement in English. A secondary aim was to evaluate the relation of the context of second language acquisition to attitudes and achievement. The subjects in this study were 130 grade seven and eight students who were learning English as a second language. The results demonstrate that in general the attitudinal and motivational scales are reliable; that attitudes, anxiety and motivation are related to achievement in the second language; and that context of English acquisition has an effect on verbal English achievement but not on attitudes.   [More]  Descriptors: Academic Achievement, Bilingual Students, Bilingualism, English (Second Language)

Bezanson, Keith A.; Hawkes, Nicolas (1976). Bilingual Reading Skills of Primary Schoolchildren in Ghana. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 11. The medium of instruction in schools in most African countries is a second language (L2); less attention is focused on the first language (L1) at each successive level of formal schooling. Little attention, however, has been given in curriculum development and in research to the building up of the bilingual reading skills of children whose experience in the L2 is almost exclusively confined to its school use and whose L1 is relatively unavailable to them in its written form. A current theory of second language learning advances the thesis that reading and writing skills in L2 are dependent upon the attainment of oral proficiency in that language. The implication of this thesis is that superior reading and writing performance will be demonstrated in the language medium in which the child has gained the greater oral proficiency. This study examined this implication through an investigation of bilingual reading skills in Ghanaian primary schools. The results show that the nature of the child's bilingual experience, especially in the classroom, may be a far more important determinant of reading ability than the degree of oral proficiency attained, since the children in this study obtained similar mean reading scores in the two languages. Descriptors: African Languages, Bilingual Students, Bilingualism, English (Second Language)

Canale, Michael; And Others (1976). Aspects de l'usage de la preposition POUR en francais ontarien: interference et/ou surgeneralisation? (Aspects of the Use of the Preposition POUR in Ontario French: Interference And/Or Overgeneralization?). Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 12. In this study, the use of the preposition "pour" (for) in Ontario French is analyzed: (1) in its use with the verb "payer" (to pay for), and (2) in its durative meaning. Data come from the written and spoken French of three groups of bilingual Franco-Ontarian students from the ninth and twelfth grade. In the written and spoken usage of these students, "pour" is used significantly differently than for a corresponding group of monolingual French speakers. A detailed analysis of the French prepositions "pour,""durant" (during), "pendant" (while), and the English preposition "for," reveals difficulty in determining whether the non-standard usage of the Franco-Ontarian students is due to interference from English or to an overgeneralization of French usage rules.    [More]  Descriptors: Bilingual Students, Bilingualism, Descriptive Linguistics, Dialect Studies

Canale, Michael; And Others (1977). Recherches en Dialectologie Franco-Ontarienne. (Research in Franco-Ontarian Dialectology.) Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 14. This study examines the use of the auxiliaries "avoir" and "etre" and of the prefix "re-" in the speech of Franco-Ontarian students. It is found that the tendency to use non-standard constructions such as "j'ai arrive en retard" and "je vais remettre la roue 'back'" has its origins in historical dialects of French. It would appear, then, that contact with English plays a smaller role than the relative isolation of Ontarian French from Standard French of the continent. Many researchers and educators seem not to be aware of the capacity for change that exists in the spoken French of Ontario. Descriptors: Diachronic Linguistics, Dialect Studies, French, Language Research

Harris, Brian (1977). The Importance of Natural Translation. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 12. The scientific study of translation, translatology, is behind linguistics in the study of data. While linguistics has reached out to include all speech acts within its proper study, the data of translatology remain, almost exclusively, professionally authored texts. The proper study of translatology is all translation. Everyday speech should not merely be included; it should be given priority. Translatologists should first study natural translation, which may be defined as the translation done by bilinguals in everyday circumstances and without special training for it. Several studies have been done on bilingualism which have produced relevant data; more research must be done, however, with natural translation as the specific object of the study.   [More]  Descriptors: Bilingual Students, Bilingualism, Interpreters, Language Research

Hanna, Gila; Smith, Anthony H. (1979). Evaluating Summer Bilingual Exchanges: A Progress Report. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 19. An in-progress research project evaluating the first phase of two-year bilingual exchange programs is described. The exchange programs being evaluated are a summer exchange between groups of school children from schools in Quebec and Ontario and a school-year exchange between groups of children from schools in the same provinces. The objectives of both exchanges are increased proficiency in the second language and improved understanding of the other cultural group. The first phase of the study is concerned with: (1) the development of appropriate procedures for evaluation, and (2) the collection of initial information on language achievement and cultural and attitudinal changes among the anglophone and francophone participants. The evaluation procedures include pencil and paper tests, a language proficiency interview, questionnaires, and general interviews. Two noteworthy findings are: (1) in spite of the short duration of the exchanges, there is noticeable improvement in language proficiency; and (2) unless prompted by a questionnaire or attitude test, students reject the conventional attitudinal stereotypes. They tended instead to report their experiences in terms of specific people, activities or events.   [More]  Descriptors: Attitude Change, Cultural Awareness, Cultural Education, English (Second Language)

White, Lydia (1977). Error Analysis and Error Correction in Adult Learners of English as a Second Language. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 13. Twelve Spanish-speaking adults learning English as a second language were tested using the Bilingual Syntax Measure and their errors were analysed. Eight of them were subsequently presented with their errors in written form and asked to correct them. The 12 adults produced a total of 451 errors, of which 20.6% were due to interference from Spanish, 60.3% were developmental and 19% were from other sources. There was no variation in the proportions of errors from different sources according to academic status: intermediate students produced 60.3% developmental errors and advanced students produced 60.2%. Most subjects, both intermediate and advanced, were only able to correct about half their errors. Their corrections of the "Is X" structure suggest that this error may be due to syntactic, rather than phonological, interference.   [More]  Descriptors: Adult Students, English (Second Language), Error Analysis (Language), Interference (Language)

Celce-Murcia, Marianne (1977). Phonological Factors in Vocabulary Acquisition: A Case Study of a Two-Year-Old, English-French Bilingual. Working Papers in Bilingualism, No. 13. This study presents phonological and lexical data describing the speech of a two-year-old acquiring English and French simultaneously. After establishing the child's phonological system(s), four categories of lexical items are described: (1) the child knows and uses both the English and French lexical item; (2) the child is confused by identical meaning yet slightly different phonological form (i.e., cognates); (3) the child is exposed to only one form, and thus uses a lexical item only in one language; and (4) the child has been exposed to both the English and French equivalents but avoids the phonologically more difficult form. Following these data, the second category (i.e., cognates) is discussed briefly, and the fourth category (i.e., phonological avoidance) is treated in some detail. These findings could also have some relevance for foreign language teaching in that it appears that unnecessary phonological barriers may cause psychological problems, stunt fluency and inhibit ease of language learning.   [More]  Descriptors: Bilingualism, Child Language, English, French

Oyama, Susan (1978). The Sensitive Period and Comprehension of Speech. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 16. Recent studies in productive phonology among immigrants have supported the case for the existence of a critical or sensitive period in language acquisition. The present study proposes that the case for a sensitive period would be further strengthened by the discovery of comparable age effects for other linguistic abilities such as listening comprehension. It was hypothesized that the most powerful predictor of comprehension would be the age at which the individual had begun using English and that the amount of practice with second language and other attitudinal and usage variables would show only indirect relationships with comprehension skill. Sixty male Italian immigrants listened to taped English sentences masked with background noise at four signal-to-noise ratios.  Comprehension scores were correlated with age of beginning English but were not predicted by number of years in the United States or by other variables investigated. Scores of those who arrived before early adolescence resembled those of native speakers, while those subjects who began English toward the end of adolescence showed a marked comprehension deficit. These results supported the hypothesis that a sensitive period exists for the acquisition of a second language. The discussion explores the sensitive period as a developmental concept and treats two themes that occur frequently in the acquisition literature: the importance of motivation and the role of input. Descriptors: Adult Learning, Adults, Cognitive Processes, Immigrants

Schmidt, Richard W. (1977). Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Transfer in Phonology. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 12. This article investigates a specific foreign language (FL) learning problem, the substitution of /s,z/ for English unvoiced and voiced "th" by native speakers of Egyptian Arabic, and concludes that the facts are better explained in terms of language transfer than by an explanation in terms of inherent difficulty independent of native language. A careful contrastive analysis can make quite precise predictions about the substitution that is made, the learners who make such substitutions and the circumstances under which the substitution is most common. However, it is argued that for the present case a contrastive analysis of the conventional kind, comparing native and target language as static systems, is useless. What is required is a sociolinguistic analysis of the native language, as it is a pattern of sociolinguistic variation which is being transferred to English.   [More]  Descriptors: Arabic, Contrastive Linguistics, English (Second Language), Interference (Language)

Kellerman, Eric (1978). Giving Learners a Break: Native Language Intuitions as a Source of Predictions about Transferability. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 15. The strategy of "transfer" of native language (NL) items into target language (TL) expressions is considered here to be an active learner strategy dependent on the learner's notion of "distance" between the NL and the TL. Some NL items will be more liable to transfer than others to the extent that they are believed to be less native language-specific. For example, a polysemous lexical item will have a field of meaning in which the "core" meaning may be more likely to be transferred than more idiomatic or figurative meanings. This strategy is evidenced by Dutch learners of English (and German) in their judgments of acceptability of expressions using "break" (or "brechen") where Dutch can use the equivalent "breken." Descriptors: Bilingualism, Dutch, English (Second Language), German

Seshadri, C. K.; Allen, J. P. B. (1979). English as a Foreign Language and English as a Second Language: An IEA Achievement Test Study. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 17. The difference between "foreign language learning" and "second language learning" is not clear because writers do not agree on the criteria to be used in making the distinction. Moreover, there is a lack of empirical evidence to justify the use of the two terms. The purpose of this study is: (1) to review the various criteria which have been used to differentiate between foreign language and second language learning, and (2) to examine one of the criteria systematically. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has measured language achievement in ten countries where English is regarded as a foreign language. The same IEA tests were used in the present study to measure the achievement in English of a comparable sample of pre-university students in Baroda, India, where English is considered to be a second language. The comparison did not reveal any difference in English language achievement between the two groups of students, suggesting that the nature of the distinction between a foreign and a second language requires further investigation. Descriptors: Achievement Tests, Applied Linguistics, English (Second Language), Language Attitudes

Bialystok, Ellen; Froehlich, Maria (1978). The Aural Grammar Test: Description and Implications. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 15. The Aural Grammar Test was designed to assess aural grammatical competence for language presented in a formal situation. The subjects used in this initial development of the test were 147 Toronto high school students learning French as a second language. The test is described and the results are interpreted in terms of both the explicit and intuitive knowledge students have of the grammatical forms tested. Responses indicated both the relative degree of mastery the students had of the target forms and the certainty, or explicitness, with which they were responding. Further, the results of the test are compared to the performance by the same students on a set of standardized International Educational Achievement Tests and to a set of predictor scores relating to individual learner characteristics. The implications of the results and some potential uses for the test are discussed.   [More]  Descriptors: Academic Achievement, Achievement Tests, French, Grammar

Cziko, Gary A.; And Others (1979). French Immersion Programs and Students' Social Attitudes: A Multidimensional Investigation. Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 19. Attitudes of four groups of elementary school students toward 10 socially relevant concepts, e.g., "self,""monolingual French Canadians,""bilingual English Canadians," and other areas are studied. Two of the groups were grade five and six English-speaking Canadian Students who had participated in either an "early" or a "late" French immersion program. For purposes of comparison, an otherwise comparable group of English-speaking Canadian students with no French immersion experience was included, along with a group of French-speaking Canadian students in a totally French-language school program. The paired dissimilarity ratings of the 10 concepts were subjected to multidimensional scaling analyses and analyses of variance. The results indicate that while language and ethnicity (French vs. English) were important dimensions along which all four groups judged social similarities, extensive experience with the other group's language (as exemplified here in "early" French immersion experience) led to a reduction in the extensity of the language-ethnicity dimension. It also reduced the differences perceived between self, one's own ethno-linguistic group, and the relevant other ethno-linguistic group.   [More]  Descriptors: Biculturalism, Bilingualism, Cultural Images, Elementary Education