In the history of psycholinguistics, there are traditional accounts that have been told about language learning and processing. These accounts revolve around the constraints imposed by the age of language learning and by universal principles that are assumed to be natively given. The contribution of Brian MacWhinney and his collaborators has been…

The research aimed at identifying approaches for building a bilingual individual through written an academic text, using five text types for achieving this goal. The analysis of text types used in this study were glossed, bilingual, dictionary assisted text, authentic, task-based text that reveals valuable insights into their effectiveness and…

An enduring contribution of Richards Sparks' work has been his exploration of the relationship between a learner's first language (L1) and a language that he or she learns subsequently (L2). The present paper considers that relationship from the perspective of learners and teachers of a 'foreign' language in classroom settings. The paper first…

The study investigates the effects of bilingualism and biliteracy on thought organisation, and syntactic complexity in the written production in a group of fifty 11-year-old children (M = 10.7) enrolled in 5th and 6th grades in a bilingual school in the south of Brazil. The children's home and community language is Portuguese, and they have been…

Translanguaging has been suggested as a pedagogical practice for bilingual students in which they use two languages alternately in the classroom (Williams, 1996) and it contributes to students' language learning with the use of two languages to make meaning (Baker, 2011). The main goal of this study is to investigate preparatory class students'…