This study investigated the concurrent contributions of three components of metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness) to the writing competence of primary three English-Chinese bilingual children in Singapore (n = 390) and monolingual Chinese-speaking children in Mainland China…

In this article, we report on the results of a critical literacy project on fairy tales, which was implemented with a class of first graders (6-7 years old) in Greece in the context of teaching Greek as a mother tongue. As a teaching approach, critical literacy entails a radical change in the school culture, being at odds with the Greek…

Writing well is a challenge. The challenge is magnified when writing is not in the writer's first language. Noncredit community college teachers in open-entry open-exit classes have the additional challenge of creating an instructional environment which assists English as a Second Language students develop writing skills often in tandem with…

This work discusses the importance of spoken German in classroom instruction. The paper examines the nature of natural spoken language as opposed to written language. We find a general consensus that the prevailing language measure (whether pertaining to written or spoken language) in instructional settings more often typifies the rules associated…

The aim of this article is to stress the importance of a dynamic systems or complexity theory approach as a necessary prerequisite to understanding the development of multi-competence in multilingual learners. Selected results from a study on emergent multilingual awareness in children, carried out in South Tyrol, are outlined and discussed. The…

Relatively little is known about the long-term academic literacy development of refugee-background students, particularly at the postsecondary level. The purpose of this study was to understand how refugee students leveraged their cultural and linguistic resources to navigate a competency-based online college program. Using a multiple case study,…

This exploratory study examines the impacts of morphological awareness on Saudi female secondary school students' reading comprehension skills. In particular, it examines the effects of increasing students' morphological awareness on their reading comprehension skills. Participants included 58 Saudi female secondary school students, who were…

This article reports a project that I carried out with prospective Maltese language teachers in order to give them the opportunity to examine their linguistic landscape (LL), to develop an awareness and a curiosity about how languages are used in house names, and to reflect on their own learning. The student-teachers adopted visual ethnography to…

Language awareness is the totality of conscious efforts to know and practice the language. As to the metalinguistic awareness, it refers to the discovery of the social, cultural, historical and ideological aspects of language as a whole, as well as knowledge of the language and ability to use it. The current study aims to investigate native…

This article argues that writing teachers should allow, and even encourage, students to code-mesh in community college classrooms. By looking at and analyzing code-meshed writing produced by three students in an English 101 class, the author argues that code-meshing provides students with both a craft-wise approach to writing and a way to address…

This article addresses the importance of supporting specific language practices of emergent bilingual students in classroom settings that are tied to the development of disciplinary knowledge. The author focuses on explanatory talk support in teaching by contingent responding and encouraging children to make meaning of mathematics concepts and…

The article argues that the Aristotelian appeals ("logos, ethos, and pathos") can be taught through the use of Twitter as an educational tool to build connections between everyday informal writing on social media and academic writing. It highlights the utilization of Twitter in English second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) educational…

This study was an attempt to investigate the functions of personal metadiscursive expressions found in academic monologues and dialogues. The analysis was based on verbal data of 16 academic lectures and discussions. Based on Ädel's (2010) taxonomy of the subtypes and discourse functions of metadiscourse, the two data sets were compared in terms…

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

Language-analytic ability, or the ability to treat language as an object of analysis and arrive at linguistic generalizations, is at the core of the constructs of language learning aptitude and metalinguistic awareness, which are implicated in our ability to learn explicitly. In the context of child second language (L2) learning, it has been…