This article examines the role of agency for the English language development of three Chinese research students with high English proficiency sojourning in Australia. The focus is on the various approaches the learners employed to strengthen their sense of confidence in their language use in Australia. The data were obtained through in-depth…

Introduction: With regard to the internal/external frame of reference model of academic self-concept development the present study aimed at testing its theoretical assumptions within the verbal domain--namely to analyze the relations between achievement and self-concept in the native language German (L1) and the foreign language English (L2). Due…

Kenya's language-in-education policy supports mother-tongue education as the ideal approach to developing language and literacy skills of young learners. The policy has been informed by findings of various past national education commissions as well as international declarations such as the UNESCO declaration on the use of Vernacular Languages in…

Recent statistics suggest that only 56% of Black students and 55% of Latino students who enter the ninth grade graduate with a high school diploma four years later, and only 12% to 14% graduate having met the requirements to attend a state university. The reasons most often cited for those statistics are boredom and lack of engagement. Creating…

The present paper is concerned with the language development of two young children from two different families growing up exposed to three languages. The children live in Switzerland and have been exposed to English, French and Swiss German from infancy. The focus is on the children's production of these languages, and the contextual and affective…

Novel word learning in the context of shared storybook reading has been primarily investigated with monolingual children, while experiments with Hispanic dual language learners (DLLs) are less prevalent. This exploratory study investigated the extratextual stylistic behaviors of storybook reading that promote novel word learning in DLL…

I describe the results of an experiment that bears on how children learn the lexical and syntactic properties of abstract verbs ("seem," "try") in order to distinguish the subclasses of raising ("seem") and control verbs ("try"). Previous research suggested that an inanimate subject in certain contexts leads children to suppose that the subject…

A developmental association exists between colour preference and emerging colour term acquisition in young children. Colour preference might influence colour term acquisition by directing attention towards or away from a particular colour, making it more or less memorable. To investigate the role that colour preference may have in the acquisition…

This article describes in detail several explicit computational methods for approaching such questions in phonology as the vowel/consonant distinction, the nature of vowel harmony systems, and syllable structure, appealing solely to distributional information. Beginning with the vowel/consonant distinction, we consider a method for its discovery…

As the student population becomes increasingly linguistically diverse, educators are faced with the challenge of providing academically rigorous instruction to ELLs. Because this requires teachers to adopt new strategies that challenge learners to think at higher levels; it will subsequently require leaders to intentionally address all aspects of…

Adults rapidly learn phonotactic constraints from brief production or perception experience. Three experiments asked whether this learning is modality-specific, occurring separately in production and perception, or whether perception transfers to production. Participant pairs took turns repeating syllables in which particular consonants were…

This paper studies the interactive structure and the interactive meaning of definitions in primary school classroom interaction. The classes that were chosen are classes which consisted solely or for a large part of second language learners, as definitions might have a special importance for them in their second language acquisition. Three…

The aim of this study was to measure the pattern of hand preferences for pointing gestures as a function of object-manipulation handedness in 123 infants and toddlers (10-40 months). The results showed that not only right-handers but also left-handers and ambidextrous participants tended to use their right hand for pointing. There was a…

This study explores different frequency effects on children's interpretations of novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. "egg bag" as "bag FOR eggs"). We investigated whether four- to five-year-olds and adults use their knowledge of related compounds and their modifier-head relations (e.g. "sandwich bag (FOR)" or "egg white (PART-OF)") when explaining the…

A manual search paradigm explored the development of English singular-plural comprehension. After being shown a box into which they could reach but not see, infants heard verbal descriptions about the contents of the box (e.g., "There are some cars in the box" vs. "There is a car in the box)" and were then allowed to reach into the box. At 24…