Central concerns in the movement to make English the official language of the United States are reviewed, publications and activities of two major organizations supporting it are compared, and basic assumptions and directions of the movement are criticized. (21 references) (MSE)

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

Describes two grammaticality judgment tasks--one in French and one in English--developed based on differences between the two languages vis-a-vis middle constructions. The tasks were administered to Anglopone and Francophone advanced and very advanced learners of their second language, and to unilingual groups with the same first languages.…

A study investigated phonological patterns in 12 bilingual (Spanish-English) 4-year-old children. There were no significant differences between the two languages on percentage of occurrence for phonological processes, however, children exhibited different patterns of production across the two languages and showed different patterns compared to…

Comments on Lindstromberg's (2001) article that argues that prepositional representation in dictionaries is frequently inadequate. Suggests that Lindstromberg's arguments are not exhaustive, and that he fails to include crucial psycholinguistic studies and to relate his views to current linguistic theories. (Author/VWL)

Describes the phonological acquisition of 129 monolingual Putonghua-speaking children, aged 1.6 to 4.6 years. Children's errors suggested that Putonghua-speaking children master four elements of Putonghua syllables in this order: (1) tones; (2) syllable-initial consonants; (3) vowels; and (4) syllable-final consonants. Suggests that the saliency…

Presents evidence of language transfer from Cantonese to English in three areas where the two languages contrast typologically: wh-in-situ interrogatives, null objects, and prenominal relatives are observed at a period when Cantonese is dominant as measured by MLUw. Comparisons with monolingual development show both qualitative and quantitative…

The activation of arousal components for emotion-laden words in English (e.g. kiss, death) was examined in two groups of participants: English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, emotion-laden words were rated on valence and perceived arousal. These norms were used to construct prime-target word pairs that were used in…

The well-documented evidence that bilinguals demonstrate cognitive advantages over monolinguals is used as a foundation for the hypothesis that bilinguals will be better able to solve certain spatial tasks, and a theoretical framework for this hypothesis is constructed. The paper describes an experiment to explore this hypothesis. A series of…

A framework is presented for grammar instruction based on sociocultural theory and critical pedagogy. It is argued that restricting students' learning to the standard German of the monolingual, educated native speaker is both insufficient and inappropriate. It is proposed that grammar teaching and learning should support learners as developing…

The following article discusses cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies and the use of them particularly among bilingual students. It distinguishes between the two types of strategies. Strategy use among monolingual and bilingual students are described and compared. The article focuses on the need for strategy instruction, particularly…

Sensitivity to differences in lexical stress was studied in monolingual French-, German-, and Swedish-speaking four- and five-year-olds. For most discriminations the older children performed better, but for a trisyllabic discrimination not found in French, the older children performed less well, supporting an attunement theory of language…

The role of bilingualism in reading difficulties is explored in the areas of: categories and variations in bilingualism; misinterpretation of standardized reading test results; and diagnostic-prescriptive issues. Particular case studies are presented. (JN)

Argues that the monolingual method in foreign language teaching is not the best for imparting the meaning of new words. A more flexible approach should be followed, so that valuable time may be saved for more difficult tasks. (IFS/WGA)

Examines the possibility that bilingual experience in infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of this longitudinal study indicate that infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event fundamentally…