Miriam Eisenstein

Real Reality Revisited: An Experimental Communicative Course in ESL

This article describes an experimental oral communication course (OCC) offered at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and reports the results of a pilot study to evaluate its initial success. The OCC was designed around weekly, structured field trips to sites where students typically need to communicate in English. Each field trip unit consisted of three related classes. In the class prior to a trip, students listened to tapes, practiced functional language, and decided on what information they wanted to obtain. The trip consisted of a tour of the site, followed by a discussion with a resource person. In the subsequent class, students evaluated the trip and reviewed the new language used and the information gained. Students taking the OCC were also enrolled in a required, grammar-based ESL course. They were compared with a control group taking only the required course. In general, the area of greatest improvement of the OCC group, as compared with the control group, was grammatical accuracy. In addition, a significantly larger number of OCC students passed the component ESL course. Learners evaluated the OCC experience favorably. The primary objective of a communication-oriented second language program must be to provide the learners with the information, practice, and much of the experience needed to meet their communication needs in the second language. (Canale 1983:19) Advances in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics have caused us to expand our view of the rule-governed nature of language. We now realize more fully that discourse takes place according to sociolinguistic conventions (Richards 1980) and

It Take Two: Contrasting Tasks and Contrasting Structures*

Many approaches are now being used to collect and examine data pertinent to second language acquisition, Studies may be longitudinal, cross-sectional, or ethnographic in nature. Language may be observed in a natural setting or elicited through controlled tasks. Wong Fillmore (1980) has remarked that each means of collecting data has its advantages in terms of what is revealed and concealed. She therefore recommends the use of multiple measures in assessing second language development (see also Madden, Bailey, and Eisenstein 1978). The purpose of this article is to examine and compare two measures of adult second language learner performance: cued production and elicited imitation. The utility of each task will be discussed in terms of the contrasting results of the tasks on a carefully delimited area of grammar, namely the related structures of third person simple present and present progressive in Wh-questions.

Dialect Variation and Second-Language Intelligibility

Despite our growing awareness of variation and its role in second-language acquisition, and the recent attention given to variability in the learner’s inter-language (see Ellis, 1986), much current research and pedagogy presumes a single dialect of the target language as a baseline for the analysis of the learner’s comprehension and production. The limitations imposed by such an assumption are particularly inappropriate for the consideration of second-language acquisition in urban centers, which are likely to contain speakers representing a range of social and regional dialects. Hyltenstam (1981) and Kachru (1982) have emphasized the fact that many learners must communicate in an environment that involves contact with speakers of diverse target-language varieties.