The Italian composer of operas, Giuseppe Verdi, relied heavily on plays of the Romantic Era as sources for opera librettos. Three such plays were from the Spanish Romantic School: El trovador and Simon Bocanegra by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, and Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino by Angel de Saavedra, el Duque de Rivas. The operas which Verdi composed using these plays as sources--Il trovatore, Simon Boccanegra, and La forza del destino--range in popularity from near zenith (Il trovatore) to near nadir (Simon Boccanegra). The study attempts to assess the suitability of the three Spanish dramas as source material for operas, and to determine if this suitability is correlated to each opera's popularity.

This thesis is intended to give a panorama of technology in foreign language pedagogy. Although my field of study is French, the computer applications under scrutiny do not relate solely to the teaching of French. This paper begins with a criticism of the rigid listen-and-repeat language laboratory concept while tracking the rise of communicative language learning theory; follows the microprocessor revolution in language consoles; documents the development of computer-assisted instruction; showcases software evaluations of computer-assisted language learning; explores telecommunications; discusses satellite dishes and other computer peripherals; presents the results of a survey of Texas universities; and concludes with the presentation of the evolving language media center.