This paper reports the results of an analysis to determine whether derivational complexity is a determinant of item difficulty in a sentence repetition task. Fifty ESL subjects took a 26 item sentence repetition test. It was possible to estimate Rasch item difficulty indices for 18 items. The high-difficulty items were derivationally more complex than the low-difficulty items; however, predictions made in the early derivational complexity research about passive, negative, and interrogative sentences were not confirmed in this research. A linguistic analysis of the most difficult items suggests that this sample of ESL subjects experienced difficulties in processing adverbials, compounding and reduction of clauses, and the non-finite verbals. Language LearningVol. 36, NO. 2 assumed that a speaker/hearer extracts the underlying representation of a sentence by first constructing the surface structure of the sentence.

Random parallel reading comprehension tests in Japanese and English were administered to a sample of native Japanese students enrolled in intensive English instruction at three different levels of English language proficiency as assessed by an independent measure. Evidence for a threshold competence ceiling at which first language reading abilities transferred to second language reading abilities was found. At the highest proficiency level, those readers who scored high on the first language reading test also systematically scored high on the second language reading test. Pedagogical implications of the study are discussed. This paper reports the results of a study whose purpose was to investigate the relationship between reading in the first language and reading in the second language when the same'individuals are assessed in both languages. For at least twenty years the issue of whether reading proficiency in second language vitally depends upon reading proficiency in the first language has been a principal concern in the second language reading research community (for example, Alderson

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This article presents the results of an empirical concurrent validation study in which measures of musical ability (pitch, loudness, and rhythm), auditory discrimination, and memory were used to account for variance in attained ESL oral proficiency. Memory was a significant, though tenuous, predictor of variance in the dependent variable. In addition, significant differences were noted for the different language groups and for the different tests. The article concludes with a proposed research program to determine whether training in musical abilities might be a profitable adjunct to ESL instruction.