ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 81, Issue 1, 1988

The article describes an experiment in the use of one category of pre-reading activity, advance organisers, with a population of L2 learners (L2-French; L1-English) at three proficiency levels. Advance organisers, like other pre-reading act)vities, are designed to encourage a more contextually sensitive and schemata driven form of reading strategy usage, and thus counteract the observed tendency of L2 learners to process texts in a too exclusively decoding oriented manner. It was hypothesised that the presence of an advanced organiser would facilitate the text comprehension of the subject L2 learners, particularly with respect to their use of discourse constraints. The results indicated some degree of facultative potential, but not in the dominantly discourse-constraint oriented manner predicted. Levels of facilitation appeared to depend on subject proficiency level and difficulty level of the text. Implications for the use of pre-reading activities and for further research in this area are discussed.

This study deals with the acquisition of English and Tamil as a second language and to explain the errors found in the speech of L2 learners caused by the interference from the first language within the frame of reference of the phonological system of the target language (L2) as perceived and produced by the native speaker of the first language (L1). The overall systems are compared so as to highlight the most genera] similarities and differences. The comparison also focuses on the similarities and contrasts between the phonetic manifestations of each phonological unit of L1 and its counterpart in L2. The data from the actual speech of English and Tamil by the L2 speakers are used to bring out the contrast between the two languages and the L1 interference on L2.

Because of ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Indonesian nation, Bahasa Indonesia (the Indonesian language) presents a dazzling array of terms of address available to the speaker. This paper attempts to classify the more commonly used forms other than the standard terms neatly presented in any Indonesian language textbook.

This article presents axsd discusses a number of empirical findings conœroing the validity of multiple-choice cloze tests as tests of general language proficiency. Foreign students of Dutch at Delft University of Technology were given both a series of separate proficiency tests in nstemng, speaking, reading, writing and text comprehension, and a series of multiple-choice cloze tests. Scores on the multiple-choice cloze tests were found to correlate significantly with each of the proficiency tests. In addition, scores made on the multiple-choice cloze tests appeared to form a solid basis for predictions of the total scores for listening, speaking, reading and writing taken together. Finally, a close structural similarity was found to exist between curves of average scores on successive multiple-choice cloze tests and the presupposed growth of vocabulary during the language learning process. Together, these findings tend to show that multiple-choice cloze tests constitute a valid instrument for measuring general language proficiency.