This study aimed to develop a corpus-aided pronunciation teacher-training programme and examine the effectiveness of a corpus-aided pronunciation teaching approach in English classrooms in Hong Kong. A workshop was conducted for 86 participants to introduce several English learner corpora. After the workshop, eight volunteer participants,…

Purpose: This study investigates young Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners' Chinese character reading performance and its relationship with their orthographic awareness. There is a pressing need to gain a better understanding of Hong Kong's ethnic minority students' CSL acquisition, so that more effective instruction can be provided.…

This paper applies the theories of linguistic distance and translanguaging to analyse the pedagogy of teaching vocabulary and grammar in English to Malay-English bilinguals who are struggling to read in English. More specifically the paper explores how the teacher tried to create cross-linguistic transfer and how the students display…

This essay investigates the classroom talk and reflections of a Year 5 lesson on reading and writing beyond Standard English. Its title refers to 'Reflecting Realities', the CLPE survey of ethnic diversity in UK children's books. In changing 'reflecting' to 'representing' I seek to move beyond concern with sourcing representative texts to the work…

Immersion students' language abilities are generally characterized by strong receptive skills (listening, reading) and less developed productive skills (speaking, writing) when compared with L1 speakers of the immersion language (e.g., Allen et al. 1990; Cummins 1998; Harley 1992). In this paper we report results from a six-month mixed-methods…

The present study looks into the effects of early multilingual education by investigating linguistic knowledge and metalinguistic awareness in young learners at the primary level. The study aims to establish whether children in multilingual education programmes perform higher on a measure of metalinguistic awareness and with regards to their L1…

Metalinguistic awareness (MLA) is a predictor of adult foreign language (FL) learning in instructed settings. Following Bialystok and Ryan (1985) two-component model of MLA, we distinguish ML analysis as the ability to compare and select language items from ML control as the ability to detect and manipulate rule-based linguistic patterns. So far,…

Most bilingual programs are built around a clear separation between the two languages used throughout the school day. However, in bilingual research centers (BRCs), a key component of the Gomez and Gomez Dual Language Enrichment model, students can choose which language to use. This is what sparked my interest, because I wanted to understand more…

We examined the independent contributions of prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness to word reading, text reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. We did so in a longitudinal study of English-speaking children (N = 70). At 5-7 years of age, children completed the metalinguistic measures along with control measures of phonological…

Although Brazilian governmental documents have conceived language teaching from a critical perspective, the recent scenario points to a backlash towards critical perspectives on teaching, which have been socially perceived as indoctrination. Since we understand critical pedagogy in additional language classrooms as a necessary emancipatory…

Quantificational elements such as some pose a challenge to young language learners, given their vague meaning and ability to take on an upper-bounded interpretation (relative to "all") in certain contexts. The challenge is enhanced when a child is acquiring multiple languages that do not share a one-to-one mapping between their lexical…

This qualitative case study examined the interactions between four Mexican parents from immigrant backgrounds and their children during the process of creating two biliteracy family projects that centered on their experiential knowledge. Informed by a theoretical lens of sociocultural linguistics and community cultural wealth, this study examined…

Background: While much is known about how morphological awareness (MA) contributes to reading development, little attention has been paid to how reading may conversely affect MA development, particularly in readers of Chinese in a bilingual/multilingual setting. Methods: The study adopted a cross-lagged panel design. Young bilingual readers of…

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false-belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross-sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the…

In this article, we report on the results of a critical literacy project on fairy tales, which was implemented with a class of first graders (6-7 years old) in Greece in the context of teaching Greek as a mother tongue. As a teaching approach, critical literacy entails a radical change in the school culture, being at odds with the Greek…