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 new approach to examining second language writing among young learners, which the author defines as "Language mosaic." Offers a new perspective on the process of writing development and examines how and what children do in the writing process while developing an additional language. Suggests that educators should view the…

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…

Discusses the role of metalinguistic awareness in multilinguals within the framework of a systems-theoretic approach to multilingual proficiency. Data from trilingual adults on their use of certain problem-solving behavior in think-aloud protocols during the academic writing process are shown to provide evidence of certain processes taking place…

Argues for the implementation of a transcultural approach to additional language learning to allow students and teachers to interdependently broaden their sociocultural identities within the context of critical language awareness and study with the goal of individuation. (Author/VWL)

Examines the view that the items writers use to modify their claims in academic texts, commonly referred to as hedges and boosters, may actually be unnoticed by second language readers, a phenomenon known as the lexical invisibility hypothesis. Data is presented from a small retrospective think-aloud study that explores how 14 Cantonese first…

Discusses the value of second language (L2) learning and suggests that students who learn an L2 in school can develop literacy skills faster than students who do not learn an L2. Examines the role of metalinguistic awareness, the role of language learning in literacy development, and literacy in its cultural context. (Author/VWL)

This article presents parts two and three of a three-part article that explores the role that school language learning can play in the development of literacy, as well as the role that the teaching of literacy can play in language learning. (Author/VWL)

This study examines the effectiveness of written error corrections versus reformulations of second language learners' writing as two means of improving learners' grammatical accuracy on a three-stage composition-comparison-revision task. Concurrent verbal protocols were employed during the comparison stage in order to study the learners' reported…

This study examines the differential effect of two types of written corrective feedback (CF) and the extent to which language analytic ability mediates the effects of CF on the acquisition of articles by adult intermediate ESL learners of various L1 backgrounds (N = 91). Three groups were formed: a "direct-only correction" group, a "direct…

This paper reports on an investigation about the relation between a student's conscious awareness of the structure of a sentence and the degree of his/her intonation accuracy as well as his/her reading comprehension. The research was done based on the hypothesis that: "if the students are made conscious of the infrastructure of lengthy…

A discussion of the relationships between communication in a foreign language and metalinguistic thought given to that language focuses on formal French language learning by adults in their home countries. Experience with adult language learners suggests a resistance to grammatical explanations but an openness to explanations of meaning. It would…

Makes a case for including corpus linguistics in initial language teacher education to enhance teachers' research skills and language awareness. Offers examples of corpus-based tasks for increasing students' understanding of word classes, register-related grammatical choices, and socioculturally conditioned grammatical choices. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the psychological factors that affect access to metalinguistic knowledge in second language (L2) production. A verbalization task was used to assess the metalinguistic knowledge about target uses and a judgment test was administered to determine relative prototypicality of these uses of 64 adult Chinese learners of English.…

Addresses the difficulties second language learners have using articles properly by examining the metalinguistic knowledge of the English article system that learners employ when selecting articles in a given situation. Attempts to better understand the process of "making sense" of the English article system by learners who are at different stages…