Discusses reading and writing workshops at Green Intermediate School. Notes that Nancy Atwell's voice has become a significant thread woven into a tapestry of literacy research and instruction among others whose work has contributed to the evolution of the way educators teach children to negotiate language. (SG)

Reviews literature on recent developments in teacher-student interaction and language learning. Based on a sociocultural perspective of language and learning, draws from three types of classrooms: first language, second language, and foreign language. Attention is given to studies that investigate the specific means used in teacher-student…

Analyzes challenges faced by English-as-a-Foreign-Language teachers teaching writing. Challenges include class size, time constraints, accommodating local needs, and lack of both teacher experience in teaching second language (L2) writing and student training in first language writing. A second group involves ideological challenges such as the…

Discusses an extensive research program that was conducted under the auspices of the International Auxiliary Language Association, whose goal was to gather information on Esperanto, Ido, or Latino. Reviews ideological influences that instead led to creation of new hybrid language, Interlingua. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the relationship between bilingualism and gender within a feminist poststructuralist framework. Suggests that all language contact phenomena, including bilingualism, acquire different meanings in different contexts and can be linked to gender only indirectly. (Author/VWL)

The author replies to a critique a paper he wrote on defining applied linguistics as a field of inquiry and the extent to which corpus analysis can properly inform its practices. (Author/VWL)

Introduces this special issue of the journal. Most of the articles included are based on those presented at a 1999 symposium on new directions in literacy research at the International Association for Applied Linguistics conference. (Author/VWL)

Scholarship on dialect diversity in classrooms has yielded two seemingly incompatible lines of research. Although numerous pedagogical approaches have been shown to provide productive alternatives to traditional responses to stigmatized dialects, research on public perceptions and teachers' attitudes suggests that negative beliefs about…

The goal of this special issue on Interfaces is to explore the division of labor between pragmatics and grammar. In the introductory paper a system of different modules and interface mappings has been presented. Some suggestions were made where the job of the acquisition process is. It was posed that most, if not all, acquisition is in the mapping…

Studies investigating the possible effects of age at immigration (a proxy for age at onset of second language learning) on second language acquisition among immigrants often explicitly take the effect of length of residence in the destination country (a measure of exposure to opportunities to learn the second language) into account. A third…

This paper considers how fluent language users are rational in their language processing, their unconscious language representation systems optimally prepared for comprehension and production, how language learners are intuitive statisticians, and how acquisition can be understood as contingency learning. But there are important aspects of second…

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given…

Numerous studies related to listening comprehension strategies have been published in the past two decades. The present study seeks to build upon two previous reviews of listening comprehension strategies research. Of particular interest in this review are studies dealing with the types of cues used by listeners, the sequence of listening,…

When accounting for the usage of some linguistic form, one can refer to its discourse profile, all concomitant features frequently co-occurring with that form in discourse, or abstract a more general claim about its discourse function, referring only to the necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper occurrence of the form. This article…

The article provides information on how to optimise the shared storybook reading interactions of children with little or no functional speech in order to facilitate their language development. Information on the benefits of early literacy experiences and shared storybook reading are reviewed as well as information on the shared storybook reading…