The status of the current standard African languages has been seriously undermined by factors such as the association of the standardisation process with colonial and neo-colonial structures, the lack of function of the standards and the rise of high status non-standard urban varieties. This paper describes the process leading to and some…

Background: The discovery of clinical markers for specific language impairment (SLI) in children can assist in the accurate identification of children with this disorder, and in a description of the disorder's phenotype for genetic study. One challenge to this type of research is the fact that languages vary in the most salient symptoms of SLI.…

This article describes the translation goals, challenges, strategies, and solutions employed in the development of a computer-based, self administered, psychiatric diagnostic instrument, the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for the Deaf (D-DIS-IV) in American Sign Language (ASL) with English captions. The article analyzes the impact of the…

The paper analyses selected aspects of the codeswitching behaviour in a spoken corpus of the English of 326 people, all of them mother-tongue speakers of Xhosa (a local African language in South Africa), and all of whom would see themselves as Xhosa/English bilinguals. The corpus comprises approximately 550,000 transcribed words of spontaneous,…

This article presents a story of Han, a Vietnamese kindergartner, during her first year at East Elementary School. A classroom environment that supports learner-generated inquiries gives her the self-confidence to inquire freely into a second language and culture. Her inquiries enable her to develop her oral and written English language as she…

A study investigated the effects of eight sessions of classroom instruction on the ability of adult learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) to produce Wh- questions orally. Preliminary assessment of the students' writing samples enabled classification of two groups: "proficient" (n=6), consistently able to produce written samples…

A study investigated the relationship between formal and conversational logic. Thirty-two male and 32 female college students evaluated the conclusions of conditional syllogism and participated in an interview adapted from Deanna Kuhn's (1991) monograph, "The Skills of Argument." Students were asked to provide explanations for several…

The third year of an ongoing research project to document and evaluate an innovative Japanese language program in grades K-5 (n=195) is reported. Two strands of research are examined. The first deals with school and community ambiance, and attempts to capture in a systematic way the attitudes and perceptions of parents, teachers, and students in…

This book provides the basic knowledge to be able to tell stories. The stories presented target children in preschool through sixth grade. Following an introduction which considers the value of storytelling in culture and in education, the first chapter explains how to use the book and introduces the "telling guide," which appears…

An institute in oral proficiency and teaching effectiveness for practicing secondary Spanish and French teachers is described. The spoken language classes of the institute took place daily, 4 hours per day for 4 weeks, using a modified Foreign Service Institute (FSI) method of small group instruction. Native speaker tutors were used who were…

This research analyzes language development in the classroom as fostering the development of students who are community builders, problem solvers and critical thinkers. Examples of both positive and negative classroom situations are used to illustrate these three language domains. Successful classrooms are safe communities where children are…

This study investigated the extent to which home exposure (HE) to the Chinese language affected the oral proficiency of students of intermediate-level college Mandarin Chinese. In fourteen hypotheses, it was predicted that HEs would perform at a higher level than would non-home-exposure students (NHEs). Students were given a simulated oral…

Spoken and written stories of healthy, monolingual speakers of Finnish were compared with spoken stories of aphasic subjects in order to determine in which respects narratives differed from one another. The comparison sheds light on the factors behind stylistic variation in speech and writing. Sixty stories were elicited by presenting a series of…

The notion that acquisition of a second language may be influenced by transfer of typological features from the first language is discussed, focusing on the role of topic-prominence in the interlanguage stages of a native Cantonese-speaker learning English. First, the topic-prominent surface structure manifestations in oral Cantonese are examined.…

In a study that sought to identify the gains in English oral communication skills of Spanish speaking learning disabled students in the elementary schools, the Basic Inventory of Natural Language (BINL) and the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery (WLPB) were administered to two groups of students aged 8 to 12 years: an experimental group of 20…