Presents an exploratory investigation of six case study subjects (bilingual 4th and 6th grade students, speakers of Spanish and Nahuatl from Central Mexico) that seeks to develop a typology of one aspect of text processing by second language readers that would be difficult to assess by other evaluation approaches that do not require oral reading:…

Presents a study of the spontaneous pre-sentential negations of preschool English-speaking children that supports the hypothesis that child English nonanaphoric pre-sentential negation is a form of metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. A detailed discourse analysis reveals these child negations as echoic and expressive of objection and…

Examined the evolution of metalinguistic skills (phonological and syntactical awareness) of 46 French-speaking children from kindergarten to the end of first grade and the relationship between those abilities and text comprehension. Found that metalinguistic skills progressed significantly, and syntactical awareness (word counting ability and…

Suggests that discussions about inclusion in the foreign language classroom should address the issues of linguistic diversity and dialectal sensitivity. Discusses models for addressing issues of linguistic diversity in the classroom, and offers a set of activities for training new instructors in recognizing and addressing linguistic biases.…

Argues that to understand why bilingual support operates as it does in classrooms in the United Kingdom, it has to be seen in the context of the parameters it is allowed by institutionally constructed discourses and classroom routines of mainstream teachers' practice. Suggests that to design effective forms of bilingual support, there is a need to…

Derisive attitudes towards Spanish in the United States threaten its survival. Four issues vital to the preservation of Spanish in the United States are examined: the arbitrary nature of linguistic prejudice, the linguistic validity of all dialects, the overwhelming linguistic overlap between nonstandard and standard dialects of Spanish, and the…

Offers immersion classroom data focusing on the use of collaborative tasks related to the content to be learned that draw learners attention to formal properties of French. Such tasks provide both oral practice and lead to more accurate language use. (Author/VWL)

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…

In its life-time, the profession of language teaching has undergone many changes. Early attempts at language teaching almost entirely lacked a theory base. In the 20th century, however, two sets of language teaching methods emerged; the first set borrowed theories from psychology, linguistics, and sociolinguistics whereas the second set was based…

By using an extended version of R. Treiman, M. Cassar, and A. Zukowski's (1994) flaps spelling task (wa_er, is it t or d in water?), the authors investigated the metalinguistic awareness of 6-year-old bilingual children from 3 different language backgrounds (LBs): English-LB (English-L1, Mandarin-L2), Chinese-LB (Mandarin-L1, English L2), and…

This article reports on the Slovene share in the European project called Janua Linguarum--The Gateway to Languages. It highlights its forerunners and its outcomes, and gives an illustrative example of how primary school students encounter and explore various languages by using a relatively novel, plurilingual approach. All the materials produced…

This article reports on a project that situates language teaching in the subject matter classroom, illustrating how a functional linguistics perspective can raise secondary school teachers' awareness about the language challenges of their discipline and enable them to engage in discussion about language and content with their students. We report…