Robert L. Cooper

Alternative Measures of Bilingualism.

A variety of techniques for the measurement and description of bilingualism, derived separately from the disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and sociology, were administered to the same respondents, 48 Spanish-English bilinguals who lived in a Peurto Rican neighborhood near New York, in order to assess the relationship among these measures and their relative utility as predictors of four proficiency criterion variables. A factor analysis, performed on the intercorrelations among 124 scores, indicated areas of interdisciplinary overlap as well as uniqueness. The best predictors of the criteria were obtained from retrospective reports of proficiency and usage. However, scores from other techniques provided significant increments in the cumulative prediction of the four proficiency criteria, a very high proportion of whose variance was explainable through multiple regression analysis.

What Do We Learn When We Learn a Language

Language-teaching methods and materials are motivated in part by our conception of what it is we are teaching and in part by our notions of how students learn. Four assumptions which underlie the audiolingual method of second language teaching are presented and their adequacy examined. It is argued (1) that the importance we place on spoken skills is arbitrary; (2) that it is not yet possible to specify explicitly all of the components of linguistic or communicative competence; (3) that what we can specify does not have an isomorphic relationship to linguistic performance; and (4) that language learning is not accomplished primarily via a process of habit formation. Alternatively, two propositions are offered: (1) successful use of language requires the acquisition of communicative as well as linguistic competence and (2) first and second language learning are analogous processes.

Bilingualism With and Without Schooling: An Ethiopian Example

Because second-language learning has been a fundamental goal of instruction from the schools of antiquity to those of the present day, many educators have been led to regard the classroom as the primary site of secondlanguage acquisition. Most research into second-language learning, moreover, has taken place in classroom settings, probably because most of these inquiries have had the improvement of classroom instruction as their primary purpose (Ervin-Tripp 1974). While it is true that educated persons are traditionally bilingual, their education is marked by the particular languages they know and not by the fact of bilingualism itself. In Kampala, for example, almost everyone has learned some Swahili and a substantial proportion has learned some English. Swahili, however, is learned casually and informally whereas English is learned only at school. Thus in Kampala, knowledge of Swahili carries no implications of educational status whereas knowledge of English does (Scotton 1972). Throughout Africa more generally, elites tend to use a former colonial language as a lingua franca, whereas the masses use an African lingua franca (Heine 1970). While the former languages typically are learned at school, the latter languages typically are not.

Language Planning and Social Change

Preface Overview 1. Four examples in search of a definition 2. Definitions: a bakers dozen 3. The uses of frameworks 4. Some descriptive frameworks 5. Status planning 6. Corpus planning 7. Acquisition planning 8. Social change 9. Summary and conclusions References.

Reviews: De Cecco, John P. (Ed.). The Psychology of Language, Thought, and Instruction: Readings. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967, 446 + xiii pp.

ciated with pre-school reading, the second study suggested that both early and non-early readers were similar in the traits and characteristics selected for this study. The interviews of the parents of both groups yielded valuable insights into parental attitudes toward helping preschool children with reading. Due to the small number of subjects and the limited number of parent interviews, however, the personality trait and interview data should not be viewed as definitive. Since one of the dominant issues today is innovation in the education of the preschool child, particularly reading instruction in the kindergarten, it would be most unfortunate if the Durkin findings are viewed as conclusive by educators responsible for changes in early childhood curriculum. Rather, the study should be considered only as an initial attempt to study early reading and its effect on long-range reading achievement. The weaknesses of the research design must be borne in mind when studying the results. This reviewer thoroughly agrees with the researcher that there is a need for additional longitudinal research in this most important area of early reading. A more rigorous research design using a different type of population might complement the findings of this study and increase ones confidence in them. Leonore Ringler New York University