It has long been the assumption of many in the field of second language teaching that learning a second language helps to promote and enhance native language skill development, and that this correlation is direct and positive. Language professionals have assumed that learning a second language directly supports the development of better skills,…

This article is concerned with how and to what extent cultural diversity and difference are promoted in early childhood education and the curriculum. With reference to the "Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage in England" (2000), I argue that dominant discourses of cultural homogeneity continue to powerfully inform the…

Three inter-related assumptions regarding best practice in second/foreign language teaching and bilingual/immersion education continue to dominate classroom instruction. These assumptions are that: (a) the target language (TL) should be used exclusively for instructional purposes without recourse to students' first language (L1); (b) translation…

This study compared monosyllabic word recognition in quiet, noise, and noise with reverberation for 15 monolingual American English speakers and 12 Spanish-English bilinguals who had learned English prior to 6 years of age and spoke English without a noticeable foreign accent. Significantly poorer word recognition scores were obtained for the…

In this article, the authors draw attention to the need for ethnolinguistic democracy at a time when linguistic and cultural issues are significantly impacting how schools, educators, students, and curriculum are perceived. The authors delineate the manifold acts of imperialism associated with the colonizing of young minds and bodies as culture…

This study investigated acoustic-phonetics of coronal stop production by adult simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Differences in the phonetics of CF and CE include voicing and place of articulation distinctions. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position)…

A non-English portion of the universal initial-cluster hierarchy is cognitively represented in English-speaking monolingual children and adolescents. Subjects in an experiment were asked to select frequency of non-English consonant clusters, and they were able to reconstruct the phonological hierarchy. (CK)

Includes a review, rebutting the arguments in the subject book, W. Butzkamm's "Aufgeklaerte Einsprachigkeit..." ("Enlightened Monolingualism. Toward the Un-Dogmatizing of FL Method"). A bibliography is also provided of all titles on the subject of monolingualism which have appeared in "Praxis des Neusprachlichen Unterrichts" from 1955 to 1974.…

Considers whether the findings on referential properties of root infinitives in monolingual children are replicated in a bilingual situation. Testing a proposal by Hulk and Muller (2000), investigates whether and how crosslinguistic influence manifests itself, using original longitudinal data from a bilingual German/English child. The bilingual…

Examined the understanding of general correspondences between print and language and specific correspondences in alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages on the part of monolingual (English) and bilingual (French-English, Chinese-English) 4- and 5-year-olds. Bilingual children understood the general symbolic representation of print better than…

Presents the resolution of the Conference on College Composition and Communication to support the National Language Policy, a pro-multilingualism response to efforts to make English the official language of the United States. Describes the English Only movement and its shortcomings and delineates other organizations opposed to English Only.…

Investigated how adult monolinguals and bilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-a-vis intrasentential cues (animacy and word order). Subjects were first and second language speakers of Chinese and English. Results show that both Chinese and English controls paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues…

Two empirical studies set out explore the relation between breadth and depth of word knowledge and to link these concepts with language acquisition and frequency of language input. The studies found that there was no conceptual distinction between breadth and depth of vocabulary, and that breadth and depth were affected by the same factors for…

Development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish was found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use in one monolingual child Spanish speaker and four monolingual child Catalan speakers who were studied longitudinally. (Author/VWL)