Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

This investigation of English immersion learners explored processes of learning English, patterns of language use, and levels of comprehensibility among 34 predominantly Spanish-speaking 12th graders at the American School of Asuncion in Asuncion, Paraguay. The analysis of data from language learning histories, group interviews, perceived…

This pilot study investigates the performance in French of five English-speaking children, who are enrolled in their sixth year of a primary French immersion program in a Toronto elementary school. From speech data obtained in individual interviews, an analysis is made of the students' control of the French verb system. The subjects are found to…

Examples of the spontaneous speech in French of native English speakers, average age 7.6 years, were collected at the end of their second year in a French immersion program. Results show that the native language strongly influences second language speech production. While vocabulary and pronunciation are of course predominantly French, the…

The Development of Bilingual Proficiency is a large-scale, five-year research project begun in 1981. The final report contains three volumes, each concentrating on specific issues investigated in the research: (1) the nature of language proficiency, including second language lexical proficiency and the development and growth of metaphor…

Selected papers on second language acquisition and instruction from the University of Wisconsin at Madison symposium include the following: "Learning and Teaching: The Necessary Intersection" (Susan M. Gass); "Reenvisioning the Second Language Classroom: A Vygotskian Approach" (Linda Schinke-Llano); "The FOCAL SKILLS…