In investigating second language acquisition, most writers have concentrated on the speech production of their subjects, most frequently on the order of acquisition of a set of morphemes. Such studies are useful in descriptive terms especially if they consider acquisition of both form and function, but they leave us with many unanswered questions regarding the acquisition process. The following paper discusses the relationship between speech directed to the learner and his speech production, one of several areas which require further investigation.

The topic of the symposium was discourse analysis and language learninga topic which has gained incredible importance in the last few years. Fully one-third of the papers at the Congress and several of the plenaries were directly related to this topic. With so much said about it, discourse analysis cannot be a new field to any applied linguist. Yet, it is a difficult field to define.If we examine the research on discourse analysis, we see that it can be divided into roughly six fields. These six fields include studies important tc both theoretical and applied linguists.First, linguists have realized that syntax (sentence syntax) cannot be understood without reference to discourse (cf. Givon 1979). Beginning with earlier work on topic-comment, theme-rheme, or the given-new distinctions which gave psycholinguists new insights into sentence comprehension, linguists have moved on to an understanding of how discourse uses syntax tc make parts of the discourse stand out in,foreground and other parts fade intc

Perhaps we are no worse than any other, but I think our field must soon be known for the incredible leaps in logic we make in applying our research findings to classroom teaching. When contrasts drawn between first and second languages showed differences and those differences seemed to match errors our students made in the classroom, we leapt to say that Contrastive Analysis alone should form the basis of the language teaching curriculum. When a so-called invariant order of acquisition of morphemes was found, we made two leaps in logic––one to say that this was the best evidence of a creative language acquisition process and a second to say that this research shows that learners should just be exposed to, rather than taught, the language. When we found traits shared by good language learners, we suggested that the curriculum should be altered to make sure everyone does what good learners do. We have looked at conversational analysis and declared that teaching materials should reflect true conversational data. No matter what the finding, we have taught ourselves to ask ‘What -does this mean for the classroom teacher?’ and made suggestions without careful thought. There is hardly a publisher or a political group that won't find (or hasn't already found) something in all these leaps of logic to call giant strides. It shouldn't be hard to find the basis to sell almost any program to almost everyone on the strength of someone's research findings.

To test the acoustic scanning hypothesis for reading, three experiments were conducted with monolingual and bilingual subjects. Ss performed a crossout task, cancelling letters in a text as they read it for comprehension. Letters remaining uncancelled were then analyzed. In Experiment 1, letters were frequently unmarked in function words, words which are highly predictable since they serve primarily to mark case relationships between content words. Changing passage difficulty did not effect the ratio of letters marked in content and function words. No significant difference was found between monolingual and highly-proficient bilinguals. In Experiments 2 and 3, Anglos marked letters in content words and especially in syllables receiving primary or secondary stress, leaving uncancelled those in unstressed function word position. Less proficient foreign students marked almost equal numbers of letters in function and content words and in stressed and unstressed positions. They also marked letters in digraphs as frequently as in single grapheme to phoneme correspondences. In the experiments, Anglos used acoustic scanning along with prediction of syntax for the task; less proficient bilinguals did not. The relationship between acoustic scanning and syntactic processing is discussed and suggestions for classroom application of the findings are included.

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