When teachers work with students to construct a metalanguage that they can draw on to describe and analyze graphic novels, and then invite students to apply that metalanguage in the service of composing multimodal texts of their own, teachers broaden students' analytical frameworks. In the process of doing so, teachers empower students. In this…

Transitions in ESL contexts generally refer to those linking words placed between sentences and between paragraphs. Transitions in writing (and in speaking) are helpful; they facilitate coherence and cohesion when used correctly. Understanding them when reading allows us to join the writer in seeing why and how idea B follows idea A. In this…

The relationship between cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, and composition has been a topic that has received much attention in rhetoric and composition's disciplinary conversations, even if current pedagogical practices used to address these matters lag behind in progress. In this essay, the author focuses on how to address linguistic…

English-Language Learners (ELLs, English-Learners, ELs) are a particularly challenging sector of the student population in United States schools. They constitute an increasingly larger presence in most school districts, growing 51 percent in ten years to 5.1 million in 2006. Despite becoming more common, schools have yet to figure out ways to meet…

The "language-culture tesseract" hypothesized in the September 2010 issue of "Mind, Brain, and Education" suggests successive links between non-native language (NNL) acquisition, the development of cross-cultural empathy, and prosocial global ethics. Invoking Goethe's (1833/1999) aphorism, "those who do not know other languages know nothing of…

On December 18, 1996, a controversial resolution was passed by the Board of Education of Oakland, California that recognized the legitimacy and significance of Ebonics in the cultural lives and in the education of African American children. The resolution, which was eventually amended, particularly around the implications that Ebonics was a…

Argues the need to develop students' and their teachers critical awareness of literature as a discipline, training its subjects in ways of reading, writing and talking about their own experiences and the worlds they inhabit in terms that may be detrimental to their own best interests. (Author/VWL)

Describes the workings of one cognitive model for the development of literary knowledge. The model derives from current discussions of the role of conscious processes in language learning. (Author/VWL)

Suggests that grammar teaching should go beyond syntax and morphology and concern itself with a more careful observation of meta-grammatical phenomena. Advocates that an instrumental view of grammar should be supplemented with an integral view of language. The ultimate aim is to make learners aware of the way a language works. (Author/VWL)

This article was written interactively over an extended period of consultation and explores questions concerning the theory and practice of language awareness, its descriptive orientations, its relationship with critical social dimensions, and its connections with current theories of language teaching and learning. (Author/VWL)

Presents a case in point to illustrate the use of subject-related artistic manifestations as an effective strategy to stimulate critical reading in English-as-a-Foreign-Language students of English literature. Suggests a step-by-step procedure that enables students to appropriate a poem without the usual over-deference toward second language in…

Reexamines the interface between foreign language study and language awareness (LA) in the light of developments since LA was first proposed 25 years ago. (Author/VWL)

Teaching materials for university-level second language learners were created with the aim of raising the learners' awareness of the rhetorical organization and salient linguistic features of essays. The teaching method relied heavily on explicit instruction and essential metalanguage. Concludes that explicit genre-based instruction with the…

Argues that the teaching of grammar supplements learners' natural tendency to formulate and test hypotheses about the language. Complicated linguistic analyses can impede this process. Pedagogical grammar can be made less formal by keeping the analysis and metalanguage to the minimum. (36 references) (Author/CK)

Addresses the application of corpus resources and research methods, through concordance programs, to vocabulary study in second-language programs. The article attempts to demonstrate that a corpus linguist's use of his access to large quantities of data to observe the relational and distributional properties of linguistic phenomena can be usefully…