26, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 28-35 To the Editor Search

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MY EXPERIENCE as a language teacher over a period of several years has led me to ask a number of questions: Why are so many students who are highly motivated nevertheless unable to improve their proficiency ratings significantly beyond a particular level? How can we help these students to become potential Superior-level speakers of the language and not early fossilized speakers? Should we or should we not teach grammar and stress accuracy in the early stages of foreign language teaching? My work in a summer intensive Chinese program in the Midwest has provided two pieces of evidence that suggest answers to these questions.

1. Instructors in the program focus on all skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—and pay attention to both function and form. Students who had had exposure to Chinese were given entry and exit oral proficiency interviews (OPIs). Tables 1 and 2 record the ratings of the students who took both the entry and exit OPIs.

Tables 1 and 2 display the frequencies of each OPI rating in the entry and exit interviews for students in the four levels of the summer program. There are no ratings for level-one students in table 1 because these students were not required to take an entry OPI.

The tables show a general correlation between the levels that these students were placed in and their performance on the OPI: the higher the level, the higher the score. Although the correspondence is not perfect, most level-one students scored on the exit interview in a range from Intermediate-Low to Intermediate-Mid; level-two students from Intermediate-Mid to Intermediate-High; level-these students from Intermediate-Mid to Advanced-High; and level-four students from Intermediate-High to Superior.

Table 3 shows that the majority of the 135 students who took both the entry and exit OPIs made significant progress over the nine-week period; however, about one-third of them achieved the same ratings on the exit OPI as they did on the entry OPI (these figures are marked in boldface). The ratings of most of these students ranged from Intermediate-Mid to Advanced.

One might argue that each level or sublevel in the OPI scale represents a range, that the intermediate-High threshold is hard to cross in nine weeks of intensive study, and that it takes longer at higher levels to improve the proficiency rating. But what about those students who stayed at the Intermediate-Mid level throughout the whole program? What factors have prevented them from moving up the scale? Given that the OPI ratings are holistic (i.e., the ratings do not tell us what specific factors place students at one level or another), it is important to find out the characteristics of the interlanguage of this group.

Examination of the tapes of both the entry and exit OPIs of these students (n=23) revealed that the group can be divided into two subgroups: one (group A) whose members showed signs of movement toward Intermediate-High and one (group B) whose members showed no clear sign of movement up the scale. Fifteen students (10 of whom were level-two students and 5 of whom were level-three students) belong to the former category and 8 (4 from level two and 4 from level three) to the latter.

While all 23 students in this group were fluent and their speech sporadically contained features of the Advanced level, the subgroups diverged in accuracy. Although group A members mostly spoke in discrete sentences, the performances in their exit OPIs were significantly better than those in their entry OPIs in phonological distinction (including initials, finals, and tones) and sentence-pattern control. It appeared that, given time, the group A students would be able to fulfill more tasks and to produce paragraph-length discourse that could be understood by nonsympathetic native speakers of Chinese.

The potential of group B students was less certain. All 8 students in this group shared one characteristic—most of the phonological and sentence-pattern errors present in their entry OPIs still existed in their exit OPIs. The errors appeared fossilized. Although the students could handle more tasks in their exit OPIs than in their entry interviews because of their expanded vocabularies, their speech was often hard even for sympathetic listeners to understand.

2. Over the past few years, quite a few level-two students in the summer program mentioned above asked at the beginning to go to the level-one program. These students felt that their control of structure and pronunciation was weak even though their vocabulary was adequate to handle many face-to-face conversations. They reported that instructors at their home institutions did not use English even in teaching grammar. The students said that the classes were conducted entirely inductively and that they often could not follow the instruction; as a result, they had problems understanding and internalizing many of the linguistic structures. Fearing that they lacked a sound base in the target language, they wanted to return to a point where they did not have to unlearn so much. Although these students were given the option to remain in level two, they all chose to stay in level one where they performed well and completed the program.

A key world relevant to both these pieces of evidence is accuracy. Factors contributing to problems with accuracy can include conceptual confusion about the role that linguistic accuracy plays in language proficiency, lack of concern about linguistic forms, and a number of pedagogical conditions. In this essay, I examine these factors, as well as specific curriculum and classroom strategies that may prove effective in dealing with linguistic inaccuracy. First, I would like to provide some background on this issue.

Communicative Competence and the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines

Foreign language teaching has witnessed a shift from grammar translation to audiolingualism and cognitive approaches. The goals of instruction have also changed from increasing knowledge about the language to improving ability to function with the language. Directly related to these notional and functional orientations is the concept of communicative competence.

The concept is not new to the field of second language acquisition. When Dell Hymes first introduced the term communicative competence more than two decades ago, it primarily referred to sociolinguistic appropriateness, which recognizes the interaction between language use and the context of a situation (Hymes). Recent work provides a much more inclusive description of communicative competence than Hymes's original model does. In an excellent review of the literature on the connotations of communicative competence, Michael Canale and Merrill Swain propose that the phrase should be defined to include three types of competence that should be considered in any definition of proficiency:

Grammatical competence…knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology…Sociolinguistic competence…sociocultural rules of use and rules of discourse…Strategic competence…verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdown in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence. (29–30)

Questions regarding the boundaries of and relations among the three competence discussed by Canale and Swain have led to a great deal of interesting work. And there have been debates among L2 practitioners and researchers over the focus of classroom activities within the framework of communicative teaching (for a review of the debate, see Higgs and Clifford; Omaggio; Savignon). The apparent conflict about what constitutes communicative competence is not easily resolved, and this has become an important theoretical issue in the discussion of linguistic accuracy. Another conceptual confusion concerns what role accuracy should play in language proficiency within the context of the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

For many foreign language educators, the term communicative competence has become synonymous with proficiency. The ACTFL proficiency guidelines include criteria in three categories: the global tasks or functions the speaker can perform with the language, the contexts or content areas (topics) in which the speaker can use the language, and the speaker's accuracy in performing the tasks pertinent to those contexts and content areas and to the text types produced. The accuracy criterion relates not only to linguistic structures but also to precision of vocabulary, the use of cohesive devices, the appropriate use of register and other sociolinguistic factors, and so on. Ratings on the ACTFL scale weight accuracy more heavily as the speaker goes higher up the scale. This weighting does not imply either that it is or that it is not important to teach the accurate use of grammatical forms to learners who are low on the scale. It only means that lower-level tasks require relatively little grammatical and syntactical accuracy in comparison with higher-level tasks.

The introduction of the ACTFL proficiency guidelines and the oral proficiency interview has had a tremendous effect on foreign language education in the United States. The guidelines and the OPI have addressed two of the most important issues in education: assessment and accountability. The guidelines can provide the basis for developing common-metric measurements for a wide range of language abilities in different languages and contexts. Further, because they described the way people in various stages of language learning perform, they make it possible to test language learners and thus permit language teachers and programs to be held accountable.

Although proficiency-oriented curricula can be designed with the ACTFL proficiency guidelines in mind, the guidelines should not be treated as blueprints slavishly adhered to for curriculum design and evaluation; they should be used as a framework within which one can examine new settings and various aspects of instruction such as evaluation, curriculum design, materials development, and instructional goals (Kramsch; Lowe). In other words, individual language programs should be informed by the guidelines, not dictated by them.

A department that seeks to design a proficiency-oriented curriculum with the guidelines must determine whether the departmental goal is to produce Intermediate-, Advanced-, or Superior-level speakers. If a four-year college or university language program aims to produce Superior-level speakers, linguistic competence should be an important component of the curriculum, since a learner must have a sound linguistic base to handle the tasks at the Superior level. A lack of attention to linguistic forms may not matter in preparing students for tourist-level activities, but it makes it impossible to produce Superior-level speakers.

Pedagogical Factors Contributing to Linguistic Inaccuracy

Focusing on Form and Meaning at the Same Time

The question of whether or not learners can direct their conscious attention to form and meaning at the same time is of increasing interest to second language acquisition researchers. Some research has suggested that in the early and intermediate stages of second language acquisition, learners have problems concentrating on both elements simultaneously because the attempt requires a level of processing beyond the students' capacity and because conscious processing during learning is serial and effortful. In a 1990 study involving 202 English-speaking students of Spanish, the subjects were given three tasks: attending simultaneously to meaning and to an important (i.e., communicative) lexical item, attending to meaning and a grammatical functor, and attending to meaning and a verb form. Recall of meaning was lowest for the last two tasks, where learners focused simultaneously on form and meaning (VanPatten). D. Larsen-Freeman proposes an approach recognizing that all language units have three dimensions (form, meaning, and use) and that it is the teacher's task to focus systematically on only one dimension at a time and to shift the focus in a given lesson as the needs of the learners shift. Yet many classroom teachers often ask students to focus not only on a message's content but also on its grammatical form. It appears that the students who wanted to repeat their first-year Chinese at the summer program may have been taught solely by this method before they came to the summer program.

Fossilization

Closely aligned with the discussion of focus on form is the issue of linguistic fossilization, or developmental errors that become enduring errors. For some learners, errors seem to be so ingrained that correction is almost impossible. Some learners may fossilize early, say, at the Intermediate level. Some may do so at the Advanced level. It appears that the students in group B fossilized much too early in their target language acquisition process. Theodore Higgs and Ray Clifford report evidence from studies at the CIA Language School indicating that learners often fossilize at level 1+ or level 2+ on the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) proficiency scale (corresponding to Intermediate-High and Advanced-High in ACTFL scoring) if grammatical inaccuracies are not corrected early in the language acquisition process. John Carroll and Rebecca Valette report similar results in academic programs. The barriers that prevent learners from progressing up the proficiency scale include approaches to language acquisition that provide little or no corrective feedback and the internalization of inaccurate forms for such a long time that “[their] subsequent modification or ultimate correction is rendered difficult to the point of impossibility, irrespective of the native talent or high motivation that the individual may originally have brought to the task” (Higgs and Clifford 74).

Street Learners and School Learners

Discussion of the linguistic behavior of school learners and street learners is useful in the study of fossilization. Among street learners of the language, fossilized structures are a chronic problem (Higgs and Clifford; Valette). Most terminal cases began their language training in unstructured overseas work or study settings. When they are overwhelmed by the abundance of the target language information, driven by the immediate need to communicate, and “excused” by the reluctance of native speakers to correct foreigners' speech errors, they tend to focus on the communicative tasks at hand to the detriment of linguistic forms. Because of the lack of feedback or error corrections, the street learners are seldom aware of their errors; when they are aware, they normally are not motivated to correct their mistakes, because of their successful communication with the native speakers. Even when street learners come to realize the magnitude of their problems after they experience communication failure, their linguistic errors usually have become so systematized that they are almost impossible to eradicate.

School learners can also fossilize if they are exposed to inaccurate models and if they internalize incorrect forms. Higgs and Clifford report evidence of fossilization in school learners, caused by teachers' flawed use of the language and lack of error correction.

The terminal cases whose foreign-language background had included only an academic environment all came from language programs that either were taught by instructors who themselves had not attained grammatical mastery of the target language—and hence were unable to guide their students into correct usage—or by instructors who had chosen not to correct their students' mistakes for philosophical, methodological, or personal reasons. (68)

Students' inaccurate language use itself can be an important contributor to linguistic inaccuracy. In the era of learner-centered instruction, students constantly hear the way they and their peers speak the language in the classroom or in dormitories at immersion programs. We have students who acquire inaccurate forms because we tell them to prepare skits, let them prepare them at home or in groups or pairs, have them write and memorize what they are preparing; then we fail to correct their errors because we are too busy. Sometimes in classroom oral practice we rush to communicative activities without providing enough proper guided practice. Often, students can function in a general way but lack precision. There are too many little mistakes in their speech. As a result, over time, the students' own output and their peers' language become the learners' acquired input. Since it is difficult to unlearn a skill, fossilization can occur.

Overuse of Communicative Strategies

Overuse of communicative strategies can be an important factor leading to linguistic inaccuracy as well. Higgs and Clifford report that heavy use of communicative strategies by Peace Corps volunteers and other diplomatic personnel often resulted in terminal 2 or 2+ proficiency ratings. Alice Omaggio also discusses the phenomenon of overuse of communicative strategies and its effect on fossilization:

Errors that are potentially fossilizable can result from heavy communication demands made on [the speakers'] interlanguage, demands that force [the speakers] to use strategies like approximation, word coinage, circumlocution, translation, language switch, appeals for assistance, and mime, or else to abandon their message altogether or choose to avoid the topic. (277)

Overuse of communicative strategies can happen when instruction is not structured at the appropriate level. If students who can only handle tasks at the factual level are asked to perform tasks at the abstract level and if students are asked to handle a situation for which they do not have much vocabulary, it is natural that they will resort to whatever communicative strategies they have at hand. Overuse of communicative strategies can perhaps result in early fossilization.

Lack of Articulation

Heidi Byrnes defines articulation as the “well motivated and well designed sequencing and coordination of instruction toward certain goals” (281). Of the different kinds of articulation identified by Dale Lange, the most important for our purposes is vertical articulation, which Lange defines as “[the] continuity of a program throughout the length of the program” (115). To achieve vertical articulation, instructors must agree on the goals of the entire program, the learning outcomes for each year, the choice of materials that relate to the goals and learner outcomes of the program, instructional strategies to help students achieve stated outcomes, and evaluation strategies for each stage. Lack of articulation can result in the designing of unrealistic curriculum objectives as well as the neglect of many fundamental linguistic forms.

When a language program includes three or four levels taught by three or four teachers who have never talked to one another about articulation, everyone suffers, especially the students. In an unarticulated language program, students may be taught differently, exposed to different materials, and tested for different outcomes in each level. Consequently, the students may keep moving from one level to another without receiving systematic and sufficient training on many fundamental linguistic forms—a phenomenon directly related to linguistic inaccuracy.

Lack of needed articulation between high school and college programs may be another source of linguistic inaccuracy. There is a high dropout rate in college Chinese courses among students who have already had training in high school. When these students start their college courses, they have potential advantages over others with no previous language training, and therefore they tend to find the first semester easy. In the second semester their earlier advantage seems to become a liability. By that time, the course work has caught up with, and often passed, what the students had in high school, and many are trapped without adequate study habits and with over-confident attitudes that undermine their best efforts to keep up. These early bloomers too often fail, drop out of the program, or keep advancing with a shaky foundation.

Textbook Constraints

In many textbooks, grammatical explanations are not explicit enough, and the lack of comprehensible input for internalization can lead to linguistic inaccuracy, especially when there is no well-trained linguist teaching the language (Valdman). In other books, the information on linguistic structures is excessive, leaving the instructor insufficient time for intensive treatment of the linguistic structures (Ariew). Teaching is constrained by learning—there are constraints on how much a person can internalize in a particular time period. Driven by unrealistic expectations for the students or by the need to finish a particular textbook, many teachers, as well as students, may choose to emphasize the communication aspects of the language learning to the neglect of linguistic accuracy. Some instructors may be fearful of offering any linguistic explanation because they are afraid they will be accused of overemphasizing grammar.

Inadequate attention to grammar in advanced textbooks can also be detrimental to accuracy. For example, in the textbook series Practical Chinese Reader (the main textbook used by more than half of the Chinese programs in the United States), there is a grammar section in each of the fifty lessons in the first two volumes. However, in the third and fourth volumes, there is no section devoted to grammar; the text deals with grammatical information at the word and phrase level. I believe that to have grammar fall primarily under the charge of the beginning level of instruction is not conducive to accuracy. Samuel Cheung rightly suggests that for grammar instruction in Chinese we should adopt a cyclical format of introduction, repeating all the major grammatical patterns over a three-year period, with increasing sophistication of style and usage in each repetition. Such a format of incremental repetition not only provides a systematic review of grammar at each level of learning but also redistributes the grammatical load into all levels, allotting more time for the building of a solid foundation.

Curriculum and Classroom Considerations

In a proficiency-oriented curriculum, students are encouraged to create with the language and express their own meaning from the beginning of instruction. Therefore, errors should be expected. But if we are to produce more than survival-level speakers of the language, we should be concerned about accuracy in all our classes and take vigorous action in our instruction. In the following sections, I survey some curriculum and classroom strategies that deal with the accuracy problem.

Short-Term versus Long-Term Curriculum Orientation

It is useful to distinguish between long-term- and short-term-oriented curricula. Curriculum planning and development is similar to market investment. An impatient bottom-line mentality can lead to a short-term-oriented curriculum, which does not generally produce students with a sound linguistic base. But a long-term-oriented curriculum can potentially produce well-rounded speakers with a sound linguistic foundation. There is a positive correlation between the degree of investment and the growth of the learners' proficiency level. A short-term-oriented curriculum that focuses solely on meaning does not produce learners with a strong linguistic foundation of accurate phonology, structures, and vocabulary. Depending on the resources available, including the amount of investment and care, students who are products of a short-term-oriented curriculum may not score or have the potential to score higher than the Intermediate or Advanced level, unless they have a lot of energy and really want to unlearn a great deal. In a long-term-oriented curriculum, healthy language development is the focus of curriculum and classroom consideration and measures are taken to prevent early fossilization. Although most graduates of our academic language programs are not Superior-level speakers of the language after three or four years of study, especially those in Group III and Group IV languages, in developing our curriculum we should make efforts to equip our students with a sound linguistic base for further significant progress after graduation.

Structuring Activities at the Appropriate Level

One step in moving toward accuracy in a long-term-oriented curriculum is to minimize the number of mistakes that can occur when students are speaking freely. We can achieve this end by having students speak at the right level, guiding them with needed structures and vocabulary so that they are likely to come up with correct forms. This approach is easier than coming back later and trying to correct too many mistakes. An open-ended situation, in which students are trying to bring in a lot of things they do not know how to say, does not help them move toward accurate speech. It should be mentioned that errors in skits prepared extemporaneously do not by themselves lead to fossilization; these mistakes are part of the growing process. But the more that students hear and generate accurate speech, the better off the program is in the long run. In our long-term-oriented programs, we should give priority to the development of teaching techniques, such as those outlined by Erwin Tschirner, that aim to guide students to simultaneously develop their communicative skills and foster their linguistic accuracy.

Error Correction

Avoid Correcting More Than the Students Can Handle. While we need to structure our classes so that students can come up with accurate input and output and to encourage accurate memorization, we want to pay attention to error correction. But we should avoid making more corrections than the students can handle. The good students who make one or two mistakes on their papers will probably look at their corrections and profit from them. But if the teacher corrects too many mistakes in weaker students' papers, the students will not even be able to look at all these corrections, much less fully understand the errors. Even the good idea of providing cues in the students' compositions and asking them to fix their own mistakes works best for students who do not make too many mistakes.

Be Aware of Students' Negative Reaction to Error Correction. We need to be aware of students' negative emotional responses to their teachers' in-class error correction. Li-Chung You reports that while the majority of her subjects responded positively to their teachers' in-class error correction, slightly more than one-third of her subjects reported negative feelings about the correction. In adult second language acquisition, there are strong egos and there is the potential for offense. If the focus of a classroom activity is not on forms, correcting students' mistakes may not help lower the level of the students' affective filter. Even during guided practice, we should provide correct versions in a positive and skillful way instead of simply pointing out students' mistakes. Hints can work well for students who are sensitive to correction.

Involve Students in Error Correction. Over the past six summers I taught a beginning intensive Chinese class. Since the teachers had students with mixed language-learning backgrounds and had to cover a lot of material in nine weeks, much of the learning took place outside class through cooperative learning. This approach left us time in class to do conversation and oral work. We had a system of pair work and group work. Since the students' backgrounds varied so much, we paired or grouped very weak students with very strong ones. With all the small mistakes of the weaker students being corrected by one or two helpful people, the teachers could spend office hours and class time on the errors that are much harder to eradicate and on the communicative aspects of language learning. This technique encouraged accurate memorization as well, since the students were required before memorizing their skits to have the teachers correct their mistakes during office hours. The stronger students can also learn something from tutoring the weaker students. This system works well when measures are taken to prevent the strong students from dominating the pair and group work and to avoid pairing didactic tutors with sensitive students in need of help.

Using Technology to Foster Accuracy

While the use of technology in foreign language education is still in its infancy and some foreign language educators still have mixed feelings about it, more and more people have realized that it can have a significant effect on foreign language education. Though computer-assisted language learning cannot provide effective oral interaction, which is crucial for developing students' communicative skills, the computer does have a place in foreign language learning as drillmaster since it can free the instructor of repetitive tasks (Jones and Fortescue). The instructor can then spend more time interacting with students and give them more face-to-face communicative practice.

Promoting Classroom Participation

Paying attention to linguistic accuracy does not mean that students should never be encouraged to communicate meanings beyond their linguistic competence. Some risk taking is necessary in second language learning. Errors should be accepted as an inevitable and natural part of language learning; they can be used to diagnose and determine the learner's current internalized rule system and to improve his or her ability to control the language.

While we should be mindful of the problems of linguistic inaccuracy, we should encourage students to participate actively, in class, since interaction in the language is essential to developing communicative skills. If students do not establish the habit of interaction, it becomes very difficult for subsequent teachers to promote participation (Higgs and Clifford; Omaggio).

Employing Tests to Identify Patterned Errors

A proficiency-oriented curriculum should include proficiency tests, achievement tests, diagnostic tests, and placement tests. Each of these tests should be based on course objectives and designed to diagnose a different aspect of language teaching and learning, and no single test can replace the others (Oller; Spolsky). These tests can be used not only to evaluate the instructional goals of language programs and to improve teaching and learning but also to identify students' patterned errors.

Numerous factors can contribute to linguistic inaccuracy. The basic challenge facing our profession in the era of the proficiency movement is to maintain the delicate balance among function, content, and accuracy. And, as we all know, this balance is not easy to achieve. Drilling, and even overdrilling, of linguistic forms does not typically lead to meaningful communication. But one cannot communicate well without linguistic precision. If our goal is to achieve true communicative competence through effective instruction, we must address aspects of accuracy.

The author is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Chinese Language Program Coordinator in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Iowa.

Works Cited and Consulted

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Yonkers: ACTFL, 1986.

Ariew, Robert. “The Textbook as Curriculum.” Higgs 11–33.

Byrnes, Heidi. “Addressing Curriculum Articulation in the Nineties: A Proposal.” Foreign Language Annals 23 (1990): 281–92.

Canale, Michael, and Merrill Swain. “Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing.” Applied Linguistics 1 (1980): 1–47.

Carroll, John. “Foreign Language Proficiency Levels Attained by Language Majors near Graduation from College.” Foreign Language Annals 2 (1967): 131–79.

Cheung, Samuel. “Descriptive vs. Prescriptive: A Grammatical Review of the Practical Chinese Readers.” ACTFL Annual Meeting. Chicago, 20 Nov. 1992.

Higgs, Theodore, ed. Curriculum, Competence, and the Foreign Language Teacher. ACTFL Foreign Language Education Series 13. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1982.

Higgs, Theodore, and Ray Clifford. “The Push toward Communication.” Higgs 57–79.

Hymes, Dell. “Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life.” Directions in Sociolinguistics. Ed. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1972.

Jones, C., and S. Fortescue. Using Computers in the Language Classroom. White Plains: Longman, 1987.

Kramsch, Claire. “Proficiency versus Achievement: Reflections on the Proficiency Movement.” ADFL Bulletin 18.1 (1986): 22–24. [Show Article]

Lambert, Richard. Language Instruction for Undergraduates in American Higher Education. NFLC Occasional Papers. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1990.

Lange, Dale. “The Problem of Articulation.” Higgs 113–37.

Larsen-Freeman, D. “Teaching Grammar.” Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Ed. M. Celce-Murcia. 2nd ed. New York: Newbury, 1991. 279–96.

Liu Xun, Deng Enming, and Liu Shehui. Practical Chinese Reader. Beijing: Commercial, 1986.

Lowe, Pardee. “Proficiency-Based Curriculum Design: Principles Derived from Government Experienced.” Die Unterrichtspraxis 18 (1985): 233–45.

Oller, John. Issues in Language Testing Research. Rowley: Newbury, 1983.

Omaggio, Alice. Teaching Language in Context. Boston: Heinle, 1986.

Savignon, Sandra. Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1983.

Selinker, Larry. “Interlanguage.” IRAL: International Review of Applied Linguistics 10 (1971): 209–31.

Shohamy, Elana. “Beyond Proficiency Testing: A Diagnostic Feedback Testing Model for Assessing Foreign Language Learning.” Modern Language Journal 76 (1992): 513–21.

Spolsky, Bernard. Conditions for Second Language Learning. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Tschirner, Erwin. “From Input to Output: Communication-Based Teaching Techniques.” Foreign Language Annals 25 (1992): 507–18.

Valdman, Albert. “Communicative Use of Language and Syllabus Design.” Foreign Language Annals 11 (1978): 567–79.

Valette, Rebecca. “Proficiency and the Prevention of Fossilization—An Editorial.” Modern Language Journal 75 (1991): 325–28.

VanPatten, B. “Attention to Form and Content in the Input: An Experiment in Consciousness.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 12.3 (1990): 287–301.

You, Li-Chung. “How students Perceive Their Teachers' Error Corrections.” ACTFL Annual Meeting. Washington, 21 Nov. 1991.

© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 26, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 28-35

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