This study explores how social pressure and identity construction patterns interact with the oral performance of secondary and post-secondary learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Data derive from 268 questionnaires probing students' perceptions of Spanish, Spanish speakers, their peers, and their instructors. Ethnographic interviews…

This exploratory study examined the relations among characteristics of children's home environments and two school readiness skills: their oral language and social functioning. Low SES Latino mothers of 122 (65 girls; 57 boys) preschoolers (39-49 months (M=45.00; S.D.=5.40) completed questionnaires about their family demography, their home…

Research has begun to address the question of transfer of language usage patterns beyond the idea that people's native language (L1) can influence the way they produce a second language (L2). This study investigated bidirectional transfer, of both lexical and grammatical features, in adult speakers of English and Spanish who varied in age of L2…

Background: The discovery of clinical markers for specific language impairment (SLI) in children can assist in the accurate identification of children with this disorder, and in a description of the disorder's phenotype for genetic study. One challenge to this type of research is the fact that languages vary in the most salient symptoms of SLI.…

The paper analyses selected aspects of the codeswitching behaviour in a spoken corpus of the English of 326 people, all of them mother-tongue speakers of Xhosa (a local African language in South Africa), and all of whom would see themselves as Xhosa/English bilinguals. The corpus comprises approximately 550,000 transcribed words of spontaneous,…

This article presents a story of Han, a Vietnamese kindergartner, during her first year at East Elementary School. A classroom environment that supports learner-generated inquiries gives her the self-confidence to inquire freely into a second language and culture. Her inquiries enable her to develop her oral and written English language as she…

Literacy consultant Joan Groeber provides educators with a teacher-friendly, step-by-step guide for creating and using rubrics to assess a wide range of literacy skills. Groeber's approach helps ensure that students gain a clear understanding of teacher expectations and assume a greater responsibility for their own learning. Offering an overview…

This article presents partial findings of an ethnographic study in a Quechua rural community in the Peruvian Andes. It discusses the uses of hegemonic Spanish literacy practices in the school. These were characterized by emphasis on formal issues over meaning; students lives, cultural, and linguistic resources were ignored. However, there were…

This is a study of the assessment of the speaking skills of adult learners of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). It is prompted by a concern that participants can have differing expectations of what nature of speech event a speaking test actually is. This concern was identified during the administration and analysis of assessments…

This pilot study reports on data drawn from migrant Hispanic families enrolled in a 4-year Migrant Education Even Start project and a comparison group of nonmigrant Hispanic families. The study was designed to examine child- and family-based risk factors known to imperil literacy outcomes. Four notable findings emerged from this study. First,…

There has been much reflection recently on how language gets used in language classrooms, by language learners and by language teachers. Rather than the perennial debate about target-language use, the author is referring to the growing body of classroom research in the area of linguistics known as pragmatics. Pragmatics, as defined by Crystal…

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that…

Studies of the biology of music (as of language) are highly interdisciplinary and demand the integration of diverse strands of evidence. In this paper, I present a comparative perspective on the biology and evolution of music, stressing the value of comparisons both with human language, and with those animal communication systems traditionally…

Children arrive in classrooms with varied background knowledge, which means that teachers must select instructional methods, materials, and techniques to meet multiple needs. A carefully planned approach that includes direct and explicit instruction--as well as extensive opportunities for reading, writing, speaking, and listening--can help…

The Standards of Learning in this publication represent a major development in public education in Virginia. Adopted in February 2007 by the Virginia Board of Education, these standards emphasize the importance of foreign language instruction in the Commonwealth and, therefore, are an important part of Virginia's efforts to provide challenging…