This study describes academic literacy development during mid-adolescence, when learners need to adjust to the demands of academic discourse as a gateway to linguistic adulthood. Unlike most research to date, which is cross-sectional and detached from disciplinary content, this study provides a two-year longitudinal description of academic…

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

Analysis of progression in spoken English by newcomer migrant-background learners has traditionally oscillated between formal assessment of oral proficiency and ethnographic description of naturally occurring peer discourse. This paper reports on data gathered from a longitudinal study of newly arrived students with English as an additional…

There is a recognised need for multilingual pedagogies as these capitalise on children's resources. Language policies calling for monolingual or multilingual policies are, however, not easily translated into pedagogical practices. Teachers play a crucial role in the process of policy implementation because they negotiate policies and adapt them in…

Classroom code switching in foreign language teaching is still a controversial issue whose status as a tool of both despair and desire continues to be hotly debated. As the teaching of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is, by definition, concerned with the learning of a foreign language, one would expect the value of code switching…

Research conducted in the 1980s and 1990s pointed to a widening gap on Hong Kong university campuses between institutional language policy, which stipulated the use of English, and classroom practice, which often involved the use of Cantonese to explain and discuss English written materials. This article presents the findings of a multidimensional…