This article informs us about the need for facilitating code-switching pedagogies that call for teacher-led scaffolding of students' home languages to negotiate informal and formal contexts for writing and speaking. Varied strategies are guided by three mentor texts the author has conceptualized or enacted in practice and research among middle…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of Spanish diphthongs by adult native speakers of English. The following research questions will be addressed: 1) How do adult native speakers of English pronounce sequences of two vowels in their L2 Spanish at different levels of acquisition? 2) Can OT learnability models, specifically the GLA,…

Developing phonological knowledge of students is believed to be beneficial to reading development. This paper reviews selected eight articles on the issue of phonological knowledge and reading development in both native and English as Second Language (ESL) context. In finding the trends and patterns across all eight articles, the content and…

This study focuses on the interactional processes by which participants make institutionally relevant some ways to take turns in the classroom, which is one of the first places where youth have to respect institutional constraints regarding their interactional practices. These constraints, which are reconfigured online through conversationalists'…

Varied realities surround the use of mother tongue education in Africa. These realities are entrenched in the attitudes and misconceptions that have gone unchallenged due to inadequate literature on the successful use of mother tongues in the classroom and beyond. The realities discussed in this paper include the frustrations of children…

Mother tongue education (MTE) has been a subject of rigorous debate for more than half a century, in both industrialised and developing societies. Despite disparate views on MTE, there is an uneasy consensus on its importance in educational systems, especially in the foundational years. Using the Language Management Framework, the article provides…

This article discusses the importance of family practices to children's acquisition of literacy and describes attempts to influence such practices through the institution of family literacy programmes. One of these is the Family Literacy Project in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which both served as a model and provided material for a similar…

Purpose: The present study examined the impact of environmental factors (socioeconomic status [SES], the percent of language exposure to English and to Spanish, and primary caregivers' vocabulary knowledge) on bilingual children's vocabulary skills. Method: Vocabulary skills were measured in 58 bilingual children between the ages of 5…

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…

This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammar (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue and touches on other second language acquisition research. Topics discussed include the concept of second language (L2) optionality, a hypothesis regarding the acquisition of the…

Duration-based auditory grouping preferences are presumably shaped by language experience in adults and infants, unlike intensity-based grouping that is governed by a universal bias of a loud-soft preference. It has been proposed that duration-based rhythmic grouping preferences develop as a function of native language phrasal prosody.…

The study "Improving Language And Reading Skills (LARS) in children with German as a first or second language" evaluates a newly developed differentiating programme for reading in terms of its effects on the reading and language ability of second graders with German as a first or second language. The participant group consisted of 105…

The National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLaN) is an annual literacy and numeracy test for all Australian students, and results from the test are disaggregated into a number of categories including language background other than English (LBOTE). For this and other categories, results on each section of the test are aggregated into…

Research on individual differences in second language (L2) reading ability has primarily focused on factors known to contribute to first language (L1) reading ability, with little consideration of factors mediating interference between languages. In an exploratory analysis, we compared the degree to which the linguistic interference that readers…

Over five hundred years ago, Copernicus presented findings that revolutionized the world by shifting focus away from the Earth and towards the sun as the center of the universe. Education has been encountering a similar paradigm-altering shift with the center of learning moving from the teacher to the learner. Learning-oriented assessment (LOA) is…