This book highlights the importance of individual learner differences in learning English as a foreign language and reports the findings of a study which investigated the impact of two personality traits, which are, openness to experience and ambiguity tolerance, on target language attainment among Polish secondary school students. The book…

Pragmatic instruction has received momentous attention in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) over the last decades. In order to scrutinize the effectiveness of L2 instruction, meta-analyses are warranted; nonetheless, meta-analyses have been largely neglected, despite the fact that they provide a systematic explanation of the findings from the…

Offering a comprehensive review of Australian research directed toward the study of the language use of children from different social backgrounds, this book assesses the validity of Basil Bernstein's thesis that many lower working class children are confined to a restricted code of language use. This evaluation is set in two wider contexts: what…

This book addresses child's language learning in a manner designed to be understandable to the nonspecialist. The major areas covered are: (1) learning one's first language; (2) the role of adults in the child's language learning; (3) discovering the structure of language: phonology; (4) discovering the structure of language: syntax; (5) learning…

This analysis of the crisis facing the United States because of a general lack of interest in foreign language study deals with several facets of the problem. Its 12 chapters address the following questions or issues: (1) the traditional conflict between Americanization and cultural and linguistic pluralism; (2) the shift in the world economic…

A collection of works concerning classroom research methodology, learner strategies and variables, teacher speech, teacher and learner feedback, and second language classroom communication has been compiled. It includes: "What Is Classroom Oriented Research?" (Herbert W. Seliger and Michael H. Long); "Inside the 'Black Box': Methodological Issues…

The mechanisms and issues in literacy are identified and analyzed as they relate to bilingualism. A wide range of current theory and research is synthesized, and concrete suggestions are made concerning the development of literacy skills in bilingual classrooms. The book is divided into nine chapters. The first chapter discusses varying…

This book compiles findings on the children of recent immigrants to the United States. The dearth of accessible census data and the tendency for school records and scholarly surveys to compress second-generation youth into a classificatory scheme that obliterates their history have obscured a major phenomenon in U.S. society--a rapidly growing…

The sequel to a personal account of the bilingual development of two children in one family looks at subsequent development and issues in bilingualism for those two and an additional child, occurring over a five-year period. An introductory chapter defines bilingualism and considers briefly its advantages and disadvantages. The second chapter…