In a paper published in "The Language Learning Journal" in 2005, Eric Hawkins describes his vision of language education as an apprenticeship comprising two stages. In stage one (ages 5-14), the purpose is "educational" and the focus is on language awareness; in stage two (14-19), the purpose is "instrumental" and…

Codemixing of Cantonese Chinese and English is a common speech behaviour used by bilingual people in Hong Kong. Though codemixing is repeatedly criticised as a cause of the decline of students' language competence, there is little hard evidence to indicate its detrimental effects. This study examines the use of mixed code in the context of the…

Because the spelling of many words in the English language (and in many other languages as well) depends on their morphemic structure, children have to have some knowledge about morphemes in order to learn to read and write. This raises the possibility that children gain much of their explicit knowledge about morphemes as a direct result of…

This case study deals with language awareness (LA) oriented instruction in the Irish language classroom, based on qualitative-type research conducted in a class of 21 English-medium secondary students studying Irish as a subject. Having outlined the general background to the teaching of Irish in secondary schools, the first section of the paper…

This study reflects a social constructivist theoretical framework in which the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a central element, as two teaching approaches, communicative language teaching (CLT) and explicit focus on form (FonF) are examined. Research questions include: Are CLT and explicit FonF conducive to reaching the ZPD? Is there a…

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of…

Research has shown that intersentential code switching is related to conversational structure. This article argues that insertion can be explained in these terms as well. Draws on Halliday's and Hasan's (1976) notion of cohesive tie, claims that insertions are a consequence of the bilingual speaker's attempt to create coherence between utterances…

Looks at the general effects of bilingualism on cognitive development and highlights the specific effects of bilingualism on third language acquisition. Examines effects of bilingualism on cognitive development, metalinguistic awareness, and communicative skills, then focuses on the specific effects of bilingualism on third language proficiency by…

Used a framework-isolating analysis of knowledge and control of processing components to investigate preschoolers' acquisition of cardinality. Found that cardinality emerges gradually in children between ages three and five. Also, tasks that increase the processing burden of a basic counting problem by adding demands for either analysis or control…

Two groups of children were tested at ages five, six, and seven to determine metalinguistic knowledge of the syntactic subject of a sentence. Found that five-year olds had difficulty repeating the pronomial and longest subjects; ability to isolate pronouns improved with age; and ability to identify longest subjects improved with increased…

Argues that the grammar of a language can be viewed as the systematic way that it works and, like everything else in life, grammar is subject to change. (JL)

Discusses Kenneth Burke's "A Grammar of Motives" and why its largest chapter, "The Dialectic Constitutions," is central to understanding the book's assumptions. Discusses also Burke's pentad and the steps of his philosophical argument. (PRA)

Asserts that Kenneth Burke's dualistic theory of constitutions pictures selves and instruments as creating and as transcending one another. Calls for a methodology dealing simultaneously with principles of permanence and change. Shows that the methodology can be formalized through rereading Burke's writings. Ties these ideas to Burke's view that…

Five examples are presented of how native speakers may try to explain a grammatical point to a linguist, and in the absence of a suitable meta-language, adopt some "lateral" way of demonstrating the point. (five references) (Author/LB)

Responds to Kanno's article (see FL 528 536), which described studies of adult American learners of Japanese and their knowledge of two universal grammar (UG) principles and noted various lateral inconsistencies. This commentary suggests that another form of lateral inconsistency, arising from failure to replicate Kanno's findings in another adult…