For our third semester of German, the bilingual novel "Mensch, be careful!" was the primary reading. Narrated alternately in German and English, this young adult "Krimi" enabled an authentic, substantial, and enjoyable reading experience. Guessing meaning from context was easier than in a monolinguistic text. Students' language learning awareness…

Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic expressions referring to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement and, in academic contexts, reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitudes and commitments. In this…

Because of its potential importance for word learning, children's judgment of whether they know names for objects was investigated. In Study 1, judgment accuracy was at or near ceiling in about two-thirds of 4-year-olds, and covaried with judgment of word familiarity and with justifying novel name mapping in terms of avoidance of name overlap. The…

Social pretend play is considered to be beneficial to literacy development. However, observations in the case study of social pretend play by a boy from the age of 3 to 5 years, showed that at this young age the children's play may also have its limitations with regard to literacy-related features. On the one hand, children create a reciprocal…

Zo eplicates in a synchronous learning environment a study that looked at the effectiveness of providing two types of corrective feedback to students in the classroom. Elementary learners of L2 English (N = 31) completed two communicative tasks, during which time they received either recasts (implicit feedback) or metalinguistic information…

This study measured the analysis of verbal flows by means of volume-elasticity measures and the analysis of information flow structures and their representations in the form of a metaphysical cube. A special purpose system of computer programs (PERTEX) was used to establish the language space in which the textual flow patterns occurred containing…

This study examined different shades of meaning that a single word may have in Chinese in an effort to better understand the relationship between language and culture. An understanding of the exact meaning of Chinese words and expressions can greatly assist non-Chinese in understanding both the language and the society as a whole. A total of 102…

Noting that language study (one leg of the traditional English tripod of language, literature, and composition) has received mixed attention internationally and is almost forgotten in North America, this paper presents a rationale for researching language awareness and three instruments that can be used in such research. The paper begins with…

In this investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, concepts about print, and literacy experiences, 19 children 3 years of age were given 4 tests of language development, 12 metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness and structural awareness,…

Assesses basic skills in reading, spelling, and supporting metalinguistic abilities in learning disabled and regular low- to middle-range ninth- and tenth-grade students. States that both groups displayed deficiencies in spelling/decoding. Investigates contribution of nonword decoding skill and phonological/morphological awareness in spelling.…

Studied language choice and functional differentiation between Papiamento and Dutch in bilingual parent-child reading sessions in Antillian migrant families living in the Netherlands. Findings indicate that parents do not categorize metalinguistic activity and reasoning as school-related, although they do categorize counting as such and tend to…

Presents three major types of language awareness elicited during a pilot study, using data collection instruments, such as interviews and tape recordings of the conversations of two groups of Iranian children living in the United Kingdom. (Author/VWL)

Reviews the rationale for and programmatic structure of two experimental language awareness programs and discusses some of the ethical issues requiring consideration in the implementation of such programs. These ethical considerations include the ethics of persuasion and need, the ethics of representation, the ethics of socio-educational change,…

Undergraduate students in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain completed a questionnaire seeking their views about native speaker teachers (NST) and nonnative speaker teachers (NNSTs) on rating scales relating to language skills, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, learning strategies, culture, and civilization, attitudes and assessment.…

Discusses whether reading in a second language is different than reading in one's first language. Examines recent case studies of adult English as a Second Language readers who are literate in their native language that illustrate the varying degrees to which readers access their primary language knowledge when reading in a second language. Finds…