This paper discusses strategies of intercomprehension in the context of the promotion of plurilingualism and intercultural competence in Europe. Plurilingualism and intercomprehension are concepts of particular importance in the multilingual and multicultural European context. These are explicit aims and requirements of the European Union when…

This paper aims to shed light on the explicit-implicit paradigm contention in connection with the foreign language area of English spelling. To this end, it frames the subject against the backdrop of the prolonged dispute between implicit, whole language, top-down, or whole-to-part approaches and explicit, traditional, bottom-up, or part-to-whole…

How are metalinguistic skills associated with vocabulary knowledge in languages with contrasting phonological and morphological properties? To address this question, tasks of phonological awareness and morphological awareness, other reasoning and literacy-related skills, and measures of vocabulary knowledge in Chinese and English, were…

Using a pretest-posttest comparison-group design, this 16-week study investigated the effects of 2 instructional approaches on the phonological awareness, alphabetic knowledge, and early reading of kindergarten children. The primary goal was to compare a form of contextualized instruction based on an adapted interactive writing program with a…

This empirical investigation compares the ability of adult multilingual learners of English to perform a metalinguistic task involving paying close attention to meaning and/or form in target utterances/sentences varying in semantic appropriateness and grammatical correctness. In a listening task, adult multilingual learners of English heard these…

This study examines interviews with 46 undergraduates to explore if participants with differing language and cultural backgrounds view plagiarism or textual appropriation primarily as a) a language problem because of a lack of words of one's own, or b) a cultural challenge as a result of either some first language (L1) cultural training to…

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.…