Critical directions in applied linguistics can be understood in various ways. The term "critical" as it has been used in "critical applied linguistics," "critical discourse analysis," "critical literacy" and so forth, is now embedded as part of applied linguistic work, adding an overt focus on questions of power and inequality to discourse…

The research reported in this paper explores the effect of direct and indirect cross-cultural contact on Hungarian school children's attitudes and motivated behaviour by means of structural equation modelling. Our data are based on a national representative survey of 1,777 13/14-year-old learners of English and German in Hungary; 237 of the…

This paper investigates whether any difference exists in the degree of second language attrition between two siblings in terms of grammatical complexity, grammatical accuracy, lexical complexity, and lexical productivity based on their storytelling data collected over the period of 31 months. The subjects' L1 and L2 are Japanese and English,…

This article challenges the theory and practice of the exclusion of the adult learner's first language (L1) by reporting learners' overwhelmingly positive perceptions of its incorporation in foreign language teaching and learning. Classroom-based research was undertaken with university students in an English as a foreign language course which…

The purpose of this article is to examine the language of girls and boys between 8 and 30 months of age, using the Quebec French version of The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. The findings from this parental report measure confirm those of earlier research, which showed the linguistic superiority of girls over boys at a young age.…

This study investigated the concurrent contributions of phonology, orthography, and morphology to biliteracy acquisition in 78 Grade 1 Chinese-English bilingual children. Conceptually comparable measures in English and Chinese tapping phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness were administered. Word reading skill in English and…

Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children's performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density…

Previous research has shown that during syntactic priming activities, L1 speakers produce more target structures when they are prompted by a lexical item that occurred in their interlocutor's previous utterance. This preliminary study investigated whether L2 speakers are similarly influenced by lexical items during syntactic priming activities.…

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the introduction in several countries of universal neonatal hearing screening programs has changed the landscape of education for deaf children. Due to the increasing provision of early intervention services for children identified with hearing loss, public education for deaf children often starts…

This chapter begins with the statement that all talk happens somewhere, somehow, at some time and is produced by somebody for some purpose, and the approach that practice theorists have taken is that talk and its context are inseparable. The challenges that face an analyst of practice are then to describe the context, describe the talk, and…

In six analyses using the Child Language Data Exchange System known as CHILDES, we explored whether and how parents and their 1.5- to 5-year-old children talk about writing. Parent speech might include information about the similarity between print and speech and about the difference between writing and drawing. Parents could convey similarity…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

In reading research, studies on good and poor reader characteristics abound. However, these findings remain largely scattered in applied linguistics and cognitive and educational psychology. This paper attempts to synthesize current theory and research on the topic in the past 20 years along 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability,…

Understanding how words are created is potentially a key component to being able to learn and understand new vocabulary words. However, research on morphological awareness is relatively rare. In this study, over 660 preschool-aged children from three language groups (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean speakers) in which compounding morphology is…

Over the last decade or so, the concept of multicompetence has attracted significant research attention in the field of applied linguistics and in particular in the study of multiple language use and learning. We argue that while research efforts concerned with multicompetence have been useful in advancing a more positive view of second language…