Illustrates the impromptu use of German among adolescents in a multilingual school in inner London, where the aesthetics of performance play a significant role in the negotiation of identities and in the repositioning of an official code at school. (Author/VWL)

Language contact is traditionally associated with language communities having a long and close association with a second language--through an existing official language, or extensive use of the language spoken by past colonial rulers, or both. Japan neither falls directly into these categories, nor is it considered a country with a strong…

This study examines the occurrence of transfer in the simultaneous acquisition of French and Hebrew by 57 native English-speaking children in a primary grades French/Hebrew immersion program in Montreal. The study focuses on three issues: (1) whether transfer of genetically related first and second languages differs quantitatively and…

Many personal names in Temne (a Mel language spoken in Sierra Leone) are borrowed from other languages, containing foreign sounds and sequences which are unpronounceable for Temne speakers when they appear in other words. These exceptions are treated as instances of phonological stereotyping (cases remaining resistant to assimilation processes).…

This work attempts to provide an overview of linguistic diversity in South Asia and to place this diversity in a cultural context. The work tries to describe the current state of knowledge concerning socially conditioned language variation in the subcontinent. Each of five major language families contains numerous mutually intelligible and…

Part of a larger study that focuses on the interactional practices in a number of primary classrooms in several different sociolinguistic areas of Brunei Darussalam, this study looks at how teachers and learners in two classrooms accomplish lessons through the use of two languages--Malay and English--in order to unpack the meaning of the written…

Reports preliminary findings of an ongoing study of prosodic mixes in the speech of three trilingual siblings. The children are primary bilinguals in Portuguese and Swedish, and acquired English as the language of schooling. Prosodic mixes are defined as the intrusion of prosodic patterns of one language into another.(Author/VWL)

This edited volume is a collection of personal accounts, in narrative and interview format, of the formative literacy experiences of highly successful second language users, all of whom are professional academics. Representing 14 countries of origin, the contributors, who are well known specialists in language teaching as well as a variety of…

The present study discusses and describes codeswitches produced by two trilingual children acquiring English, Spanish and Hebrew simultaneously from birth. Data were collected regularly over a period of 20 months (from age 2;6 to 4;2 for M and from age 5;5 to 7;1 for E), in naturalistic tape-recorded sessions. Codeswitches drawn from…

In the process of language shift from the immigrant languages to English, everyday communication within the family can become increasingly problematic due to strong divergences in the linguistic competences of the older and the younger generations. This article explores the process of language mediation between different generations, as it occurs…

Infant bilingualism can be defined as a child being exposed to two or more languages from birth. Because of the dearth of first-hand research on the effect of a bilingual environment on a child's speaking patterns, parents from multilingual backgrounds raised their daughter in a bilingual environment, German and Spanish, in England. They speak to…

Describes the multilingual situation underlying the educational scheme in the Philippines, a system inherent with problems arising from the unequal developmental status of Filipino and English and the subsequent failure to meet manpower and material needs. The article issues a call to use the synergy created by two languages. Bajunid's response…

A study of two English-Hebrew bilingual children's productive vocabulary loss in oral Portuguese after discontinued contact with the language investigated lexical loss in Portuguese storytelling behavior. Analysis focused on the nature of attrited productive lexicon, compensatory lexical production strategies, and lexical retrieval process.…

Reviews the literature on second language medium of instruction and educational achievement in Kenya using classroom data from English, Kiswahili, and mother tongue mathematics lessons and from lessons where code switching occurred. Argues that regardless of the instructional medium, a transmissional model of teaching and learning predominates.…

Very little research has been done on first or second language acquisition in the Philippines. Most second language learning studies cited in the literature concern acquisition of English in English-speaking communities, and most American studies of Filipino language acquisition are superficial, consisting primarily of morpheme analysis. The…