Thousands of students in California learn English as a second language in schools that utilize exclusively monolingual--English Only--literacy programs. With such programs students do not have the opportunity to use the knowledge of their first language in order to acquire and master their second language. The project of cooperative bi-literacy…

In general, the vitality and social functions of a language are assessed in connection with such indices as the language's intergenerational transmission, the absolute number of speakers and proportion of speakers in the population, its present domains of use, its development within diverse domains of use, and the availability of its educational…

This monograph discusses the language situation in Japan, with an emphasis on language planning and policy. Japan has long considered itself to be a monoethnic and therefore monolingual society, despite the existence of substantial old-comer ethnic minorities, and this--with the instrumental exception of English--has been reflected in its language…

Background: A large proportion of children are exposed to more than one language, yet research on simultaneous bilingualism has been relatively sparse. Traditionally, there has been concern that bilingualism may aggravate language difficulties of children with language impairment. However, recent studies have not found specific language impairment…

The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with…

This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations--English-Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English-Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups…

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of bilinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and…

Deals with monolingualism in foreign language teaching, taking up for consideration the work of Dodson ("Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method," London, Pitman, 1967) and his research. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Results showed that monolingual and bilingual preschoolers understand equally that objects may be renamed. However, monolinguals were more likely to mention the object's properties when justifying an answer, whereas bilinguals were more likely to mention social context. (Author/MP)

Offers a state of the art overview of studies into trilingualism and looks at trilingual competence with a view to comparing it with bilingual competence to ascertain the extent to which any of the differences are amenable to explanation in quantitative or qualitative terms. (Author/VWL)

Presents a selective examination of the entries of the preposition "on" in five advanced learners' dictionaries published in the United Kingdom. The principal concern is the preposition "on" as a signifier of contact with a surface--especially an upper surface. (Author/VWL)

This study examined the language development of 55 preschool-age children adopted from China who had resided in their permanent homes for approximately 2 years or longer. Slightly over 5% of the children scored below average on 2 or more measures from a battery of standardized speech-language tests normed on monolingual English speakers. However,…

The impact of four long-term knowledge variables on serial recall accuracy was investigated. Serial recall was tested for high and low frequency words and high and low phonotactic frequency nonwords in 2 groups: monolingual English speakers and French-English bilinguals. For both groups the recall advantage for words over nonwords reflected more…

If different languages map words onto referents in different ways, bilinguals must either (a) learn and maintain separate mappings for their two languages or (b) merge them and not be fully native-like in either. We replicated and extended past findings of cross-linguistic differences in word-to-referent mappings for common household objects using…

Dijkstra and van Heuven have made an admirable attempt to develop a new model of bilingual memory, the BIA+. Their article presents a clear and well-reasoned theoretical justification of their model, followed by a description of their model. The BIA+ is, as the name implies, an extension of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model…