This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

Education research has shown the importance of helping students develop comprehension skills. Explanation-seeking rather than fact-seeking pedagogies have been shown to warrant deeper student understanding. This study investigates the use of Knowledge Forum (KF) in K-6 classrooms (n = 251) to develop students' explanation skills. To this end, we…

A substantial number of studies have examined the effects of grammar correction on second language (L2) written errors. However, most of the existing research has involved unidirectional written feedback. This classroom-based study examined the effects of oral negotiation in addressing L2 written errors. Data were collected in two intermediate…

The relationship between first language (L1) typology, defined as the classification of languages according to their structural characteristics (e.g. phonological systems and writing systems), and the development of second (L2) and third (L3) language skills and literacy proficiency in multilingual children was investigated in this study. The…

This study investigated visuo-orthographic knowledge in deaf readers of French compared to age-matched hearing subjects. More specifically, we were interested in knowledge related to the legal position of double consonants and to the fact that double consonants are much more frequent than double vowels in written French. We used a word-likeness…

Realistic spoken discourse, as it actually is used in real-life situations, would not be acceptable in the written medium: the established conventions of the written medium are not adequately equipped to convey the phonological subtleties and undertones of speech. Novelists use dialogue to imitate or mirror reality, but writing carries with it…

Written language performance of 16 11th-grade students differed significantly from their fifth grade performance. Few differences occurred between teachers and eleventh grade students for total amounts of linguistic information used. (CM)

A study examined whether Canadian twelfth grade students' papers would rate differently when they were written in different modes and whether there are significant differences between global (modified holistic) scores and rhetorical effectiveness (modified primary trait) scores for the same papers. Fifty students wrote on two transactional topics…

Reports on a study that monitored and corrected the writing of bilingual Fransaskois students and immersion graduates in the same class. The study's objectives were to determine whether francophones and anglophones made similar or different mistakes and whether the two groups could be taught together without prejudice. Both groups made similar…