This article reports a study that aimed to find out whether F0 patterns of L2 English produced by Vietnamese speakers are different to those of native English speakers, whether the non-native F0 patterns are transferred from Vietnamese, and to what extent English and Vietnamese F0 profiles differ. Ten native/L1 Australian English speakers, 20…

Families' mealtime talk has significant implications for children's language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore: (1) the nature of the Chinese parents' language use in interactions with children at mealtime; and (2) the factors…

While there is widespread agreement on the expected benefits of hands-on access to corpora for language learners, reports abound of the difficulties involved in realising those benefits in practice. A particular focus of discussion is the challenge of transferring the skills of the corpus linguist to learners, so that they can explore this type of…

In this article the authors report on the use of a scaffolding pedagogy (Gibbons, 2009), informed by systemic functional linguistics, to support the writing of English language learners in middle years curriculum learning. They focus on the work of one teacher and her English class across the first 18 months of a longitudinal design-based literacy…

This study examined the effect of native language background on listeners' perception of native and non-native vowels spoken by native (Hong Kong Cantonese) and non-native (Mandarin and Australian English) speakers. They completed discrimination and an identification task with and without visual cues in clear and noisy conditions. Results…

The development of oral language and specifically increased control over literate discourse is critical to students' ability to create and comprehend texts in the early years of schooling and beyond. For students with home languages that differ from the forms of language used in school, the development of oral language through carefully designed…

This paper explores the outcomes of the first year of the implementation of a mathematics program ("Representations, oral language and engagement in Mathematics": RoleM) which is framed upon research relating to effectively supporting young Indigenous students' learning. The sample comprised 230 Indigenous students (average age 5.76…

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

This paper investigates the retention of Polish language and culture by first generation Polish migrants from the 1980s and their second generation offspring (aged 15-24) from endogamous and exogamous marriages. We examine various domains such as the home, social networks, visits to Poland, institutions of learning, the Polish media, the Polish…

This quantitative study intends to better understand the impact of the location of the first deleted word upon the estimation of text difficulty yielded by successive cloze tests based on random deletion from a single passage. The variation in sampling of language features across five cloze tests based on the same passage is random and thus not…

There have been few Australian studies of language maintenance amongst immigrant languages from the Indian subcontinent. The present study focuses on Tamil speakers in Melbourne from Sri Lanka or India, who are Hindus or Christians. Tamil is a pluricentric language that has been under the domination of English in these countries, at least amongst…

Discusses the progress in the number of innovations and neutralizations in the pronominal system of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia. The changes are analyzed by age-group usage, and patterns of the changes are suggested. Part of a sample interview in presented. (Author/LMO)

Discusses the linguistic systems of children of Italian immigrants in Australia and the children's mastery of standard Italian and various dialects. Also reviews evidence for claims of the emergence of a new linguistic form labelled "Australitalian." (EKN)

A study investigated the attitudes of bilinguals toward each language and toward language mixing (codeswitching), expressions of identity, and how this relates to linguistic behavior. Subjects were 15 undergraduate students of Spanish-English interpreting and translation at an Australian university whose age (19-53), language proficiency, and…

Patterns of language maintenance among immigrants have been researched widely, and lie at the core of daily life for immigrant families. The present study reports on a questionnaire developed to assess various aspects of language maintenance, focusing on parent-child communication. Parents and children of 307 immigrant families living in Sydney,…