Investigates the extent to which traditional regional characteristics persist in the linguistic repertoire of school children and then on the manner in which dialectal feature and the level of children's awareness of them interact with learning to read and write. Data from a sample of children in the first to fourth years of elementary schools…

Describes a two-year research project in Portugal for the purpose of helping teachers cope with the problem of teaching Cape Verdian children (nonnative speakers of Portuguese) to read Portuguese successfully. (SR)

Some teaching and learning that occurred in the English on the Job Project, a long-term English-as-a-Second-Language program for immigrant employees in Australia, is reported. Language awareness, which was intentionally exploited or developed to increase second-language (L2) proficiency, had a significant positive effect on L2 development.…

To study whether metalinguistic benefits of childhood bilingualism flow on to reading acquisition, word awareness skills were developed in one group of monolingual English children and in another "marginal bilingual" group. Results strengthen the argument for a causal role in reading acquisition for word awareness. (Contains 63 references.)…

Incompleteness of competence--lack of command of certain second-language (L2) aspects--and divergence--interlanguage representations of L2 properties different from native representations--are distinct states of grammatical competence, as seen in French and English speakers of Italian (L2). Discussion argues that competence differences reflect…

Compared grammaticality judgment (GJ) test data with dehydrated sentence test data, collecting data about verb movement from three levels of adult second-language (L2) Spanish learners. The GJs of L2 learners were consistent, suggesting that a relationship exists between a standard GJ test and a dehydrated sentence test and noting that GJ data are…

Reports on an ESRC-funded study of the levels of knowledge about language of first-year undergraduate student learners of French and the relationship between this metalinguistic knowledge and language proficiency and aptitude. (Author/VWL)

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)

Tests the effect of Contrastive metalinguistic input (CMI) on acquisition of grammatical aspect in English by English teachers and student teachers who were able to recognize the difficult target language structures but who avoided production. Results are interpreted within a cognitive framework of second language acquisition as indication that…

Outlines features of conversational storytelling and describes a consciousness-raising activity involving a picture story and story transcript designed to raise learner awareness of linguistic realizations of these features. Considers how this activity can be supplemented by other activities that encourage students to make use of growing awareness…

Attempted to address two methodological problems found in current investigations of the role of awareness in second language behavior: defining what constitutes awareness and operationalizing and measuring different levels of awareness and their effects on second language behavior. (Author/VWL)

Explores the effects of the relationship between exposure to two languages in childhood and metalinguistic abilities. Arabic-speaking children who had been exposed to both spoken and literary Arabic were compared to Russian-Hebrew bilinguals and Hebrew monolinguals. Subjects were kindergarten students; they were tested on language arbitrariness,…

This article introduces a new analytical approach to the study of identity options offered in foreign and second language textbooks. This approach, grounded in poststructuralist theory and critical discourse analysis, is applied to 2 popular beginning Russian textbooks. Two sets of identity options are examined in the study: imagined learners…

This paper investigates L2 English learners' reactions to mixed personality in a pedagogic grammar. Personality refers to how authors represent themselves in a text and interact with their readers (e.g. personally via the use of personal pronouns or impersonally via the use of the passive, etc.); mixed personality occurs when an author switches…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how retrospective verbal reports can contribute to our understanding of the factors influencing the interlanguage development of tense and grammatical aspect. The goal was to gain insights into (1) the mental representations second language learners hold of tense and grammatical aspect, and (2) the…