Thin is a progress report on a community-based educational experiment designed to develop bilingual competence by having Englishspeaking children instructed in French. The report, a sequel to a 1969 Journal oj Educational Psychology article, describes the progress of children at the end of Grade 5 with regard to linguistic development in both English and French, cognitive development, and changes in intergroup attitudes.

The presenl study investigated the use of five speech markers in the native and second language production of French-English bilinguals in a military setting. We propose that these speech markers, mechanisms for self-repair and turn-taking in conversations, are a major component of fluency. The ten participants, five high fluency speakers and five low fluency speakers, were tape-recorded with their peers in three different situations in their native and second languages, and the frequency of occurrence of speech markers was tabulated for a 5-minute segment for each situation.It was hypothesized that speakers who used differentially more prepositioned repairs (progressives) or markers placed before the repair that do not require a reorganization of the expectation of what is to follow based on what has been produced in the turn so far, would be judged more favourably than those who used more postpositioned repairs (regressives). There was no quantitative difference in the frequency of occurrence of speech markers between the high and low fluency speakers, but the high fluency speakers used more progressive than regressive types of marker. Progressive markers place fewer demands on the interlocutor than regressive markers, which require constant readjustments on the part of the listener. The profiles were similar for each individual in the native and second language but in every case there were fewer markers in the native than in the second language. Furthermore, there were fewer markers in the planned (teaching) than in the unplanned (interview) situation. The findings have important implications for the evaluation of second language fluency.

This study was designed to investigate the acquisition of a set of complex English structures by adult learners of English at two different levels of proficiency. The results indicated a developmental pattern similar to that reported by Chomsky for child native speakers. Interesting language learning strategies were revealed. In interpreting ambiguous sentences, beginners tended to rely on semantic rather than on syntactic information. All subjects appeared to deal directly with the linguistic data of the target language. No evidence was found that they attempted to translate or to map native language structures onto those of the target language. In no instance did we find evidence of language learning strategies different from those reported in the literature for child native speakers.

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