This article concerns second language teaching with a format-based method. The followingarticle in this issue concerns foreign language teaching using the same approach. In the presentstudy, the differences between a format-based teaching approach and a standard approach used astreatments in a quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design are described in detail.The hypothesis tested is whether the effects of a format-based teaching method and a standardsecond language teaching method differ after two years for children at the age of 6. Results ofMANOVA analysis for repeated measures show that the groups are quite comparable on thedependent variables, with some small differences in development between the two groups.Univariate results reveal that these differences favor children in the experimental group for soundarticulation and favor children in the control group for sound discrimination. The results of thepresent article and those of the following article are discussed in light of broader issuesconcerning the differences between second language and foreign language teaching.

This article describes the preliminary findings in the Basque Country of a project shared byfour European countries to teach a second language or a foreign language to preschool andschool-age children. The method used to teach the foreign language – in this case, the thirdlanguage (English) – is based on the use of dramatized formats (Taeschner, 1992). Here,we examine (1) the level of proficiency attained by the experimental groups (50 pupils) at the endof the first year and at the end of the second year of working with the method and (2) the level ofproficiency attained by the experimental groups by the end of the second year compared to thatattained by the control groups (20 pupils) working with a different method. Other variables arealso considered: specific behavior types (disruptive, withdrawn), intelligence, sex, languageachievement, and sociocultural background. The pupils were tested at the beginning of theproject, at the end of the first year, and at the end of the second year. The linguistic data weretranscribed and analyzed with the CLAN programs of CHILDES (MacWhinney, 1995), andvarious statistical analyses were carried out. The results indicate significant differences inlanguage proficiency in favor of the experimental group as well as some interesting informationabout children with specific behaviors learning with this method.

The study explores the criterion-related validity of the Swedish version of the CommunicativeDevelopment Inventories–Word & Sentences (SECDI-W&S). In two follow-upprocedures, SECDI-W&S was used to assess vocabulary and grammar skills in 32 children atages 1;10 or 2;4. At the first follow-up, 14 months later (at ages 3;0 or 3;6), two grammar tasksfrom the SECDI-W&S and one narrative task (frog story) were given to 27 children.Predictive validity ranged from .50 to .60 for most assessed skills over the 14-month period,whereas concurrent validity scores at ages 3;0 or 3;6 ranged from .48 to .70. The secondfollow-up at 26 months (at ages 4;0 or 4;6) was conducted with the narrative task only. Predictivevalidity from ages 1;10 or 2;4 for the second follow-up remained high for some of the measures;however, for other measures it diminished, which could be partly accounted for by ceiling effects.The overall results confirm that the criterion-related validity of the SECDI is sound.

This study attempted to determine whether phonological decoding could be observed amongseverely and profoundly deaf children during reading. For this purpose, the ability of 20 deafchildren to detect phonological similarities between three written pseudowords (a model item andtwo test items) was investigated. In the first condition, one of the test items was a homophone ofthe model (e.g., kise, kyse, kine). In the second condition, oneof the test items had the same first syllable as the model item, as defined by its structure or bynasalization (e.g., lan.jier, lan.du, la.nud). The resultsdemonstrated that deaf children with good speech levels, as well as hearing children matched onword reading level, were sensitive to homophony when visual proximity between the model andtest items were controlled. They were also sensitive to syllabic structure when the first syllableswere CV and in the nasalization condition. By contrast, deaf children with poor speech abilitiesdid not show this pattern of results in all conditions. The possibility that the latter results could beexplained by deaf children's sensitivity to orthographic frequency phenomena is discussed.A link between sensitivity to phonology in written language and speech skills is suggested, and theimplications of those results for a general understanding of the reading processes of deaf childrenare presented.

A sentence interpretation experiment based on Bates and MacWhinney's CompetitionModel was administered to L2 learners of English and Chinese at three different stages oflearning. The main purposes of the research were (a) to examine how transfer patterns at thesentence processing level change as a function of proficiency and (b) to investigate whether orhow transfer patterns found in Chinese EFL learners (i.e., native speakers of a semantics-basedlanguage learning a syntax-centered target language) differ from those found in English CFLlearners (i.e., native speakers of a syntax-based language acquiring a semantics-centered one). Theresults show that transfer patterns do vary as a function of proficiency, and that Chinese EFLlearners and English CFL learners display somewhat different patterns of developmental change insentence processing transfer.

In Experiment 1, 42 multilinguals were able to maintain native language writing quality andfluency in the presence of unattended irrelevant speech while maintaining a concurrent 6-digitmemory load. In Experiment 2, 80 bilinguals reduced fluency during writing with the 6-digit loadonly. In previous research, over 100 monolinguals of comparable verbal and nonverbal skills inthree experiments reduced quality and fluency under both secondary tasks (Ransdell, Levy, &Kellogg, 1996). The results are interpreted in terms of a bilingual skill advantage in suppressingirrelevant information. Possessing fluency in another language may confer long-term workingmemory benefits during dual-task language conditions for bilinguals and even more so formultilinguals.

This anthology consists of 20 chapters contributed by 25 authors and coauthors; its articlesare divided into three sections corresponding to the title categories: politics, pedagogy, andparticipation. As Trudy Smoke states in the preface, “I decided to use the term adult ESL in its broadest sense – non-native speaking adults who participate in ABE (adult basic education), community college, or senior college programs” (p. ix). However, about 75% of the articles are written from a community college or senior college perspective, with a focus on intermediate-level or above English language learners. There is nothing inherently wrong with this; in fact, it may be inevitable that college ESL teachers are more likely to be able to write articles than their ABE colleagues, who are among the most overworked and underpaid teachers in U.S. education. Smoke notes briefly that some ESL students in ABE programs eventually enroll in community and senior colleges, but for the most part the reader is left having to infer how the insights of college ESL practice and research might apply to teachers in community-based ABE programs in ESL. A more extended discussion of the similarities and differences between ABE and college-based learners would have made the book more useful,especially for new teachers or other readers not familiar with the field.

WordNet is an on-line relational database of the English lexicon developed by George Millerand coworkers at Princeton University (Miller, Beckwith, Fellbaum, Gross, & Miller, 1990).The meaning of a particular word in WordNet is expressed principally through its relations toother words and sets of synonyms, with the structure of the database reflecting the currentpsycholinguistic understanding of the mental lexicon.

One of the most fundamental, yet often neglected, or even paradoxical questions in the fieldof language acquisition is how children who have not yet acquired stable grammar can processlanguage and still manage to acquire new grammar. This question is further complicated bycross-linguistic differences, such as how English- and Japanese-speaking children process complexsentences in their respective languages. To answer these two intricate questions, we need toidentify cross-linguistically common – possibly universal or quasi-universal –characteristics in terms of the development of language processing strategies. At the same time,we also need to know whether different language processing strategies are used by children whospeak different languages. We thus need to take both developmental and cross-linguistic issuesinto consideration simultaneously.