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)

Describes the outcomes of an investigation into the misconceptions and difficulties encountered when learning grammar. The study is based on evidence collected from a class of 12-year-olds who were engaged in a work scheme focusing on grammar, and two cohorts of PGCE English students undertaking an intensive grammar course. (Author/VWL)

Describes how one short silent film, "The Painted Lady," may be used to build language and content knowledge in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) courses. Provides a representative list of titles and corresponding content areas to assist instructors in their efforts to incorporate silent film into ESL courses. (SG)

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…

Language teachers are called upon to understand both the nature of students' intercultural competence and their own role in its development. Limited research attention has been paid to the relationship between the types of behaviour that language teachers model and the intercultural competence their students acquire. This article reports on a case…

This study tested the segmentation hypothesis of dyslexia by measuring implicit phonological representations in reading-disabled 11- to 13-year-olds. Implicit measures included lexical gating, priming, and syllable similarity tasks designed to reduce metalinguistic demands. Children with dyslexia performed consistently worse than CA and RA…

This article focuses on some of the key issues that need to be addressed by 2010 if MLPS in England is going to work. The aims of MLPS need defining as educational, not instrumental; the KS1/2 experience has to be enjoyable and rewarding: an apprenticeship in learning how to learn a language, providing the tools for later learning and raising…

This article describes the systematic and detailed processes undertaken to modify a research methodology for use with language-impaired adolescents. The original methodology had been used previously with normally achieving adolescents and speech pathologists to obtain their opinions about the relative importance of selected communication skills…

Previous research has shown that individual differences in working memory (WM) are highly predictive of a wide range of cognitive behaviours. Until recently, research has focused on monolingual, or undifferentiated, populations. The present research compares metacognitive awareness, as measured by self-ratings of reading, writing, speaking and…

This paper examines evaluation in reading. Evaluation refers to the processes by which readers monitor their ongoing text comprehension to assess performance and task difficulties. Monitoring is assumed to explain a large proportion of individual differences in text comprehension, in that individuals need to be aware of their objectives and…

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…

The ultimate goal of reading is to construct text meaning based on visually encoded information. Essentially, it entails converting print into language and then to the message intended by the author. It is hardly accidental, therefore, that, in all languages, reading builds on oral language competence and that learning to read uniformly requires…