The education system of Pakistan is not unified. Students mainly attend three types of schools with different languages as medium of instruction; private schools, public schools and religious schools (called locally madrassas). Even though mother tongue education is emphasized in education and literacy circles, Pakistan has not been able to…

In this study, monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) five- and six-year-old children completed a grammaticality judgment test in order to assess their awareness of the grammaticality of two types of syntactic constructions in English: word order and gender representation. All children were better at detecting…

This paper explores the approaches and strategies used by secondary school learners of different languages in England completing Asset Languages reading tasks at levels A1 and A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Assessments across languages at the same level of proficiency were designed to a common specification and at…

Orthographic knowledge in Chinese was hypothesized to affect elementary Chinese text comprehension (four essays) by 80 twelve-year-old ethnic alphasyllabary language users compared with 74 native Chinese speakers at similar reading level. This was tested with two rapid automatized naming tasks; two working memory tasks; three orthographic…

The recognition of the systematic nature of the interference of the mother tongue when learning a second language is among the most significant advances in linguistics for the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The work of Weinreich showed that interference between language systems--the absorption of loan words, calques, and phonological,…

This wordbook was prepared to help carry out the policy of the Agency for International Development to encourage Americans stationed abroad to learn the official language at their duty post. The book is intended to be a supplemental text for both private individual study and formal classroom instruction. The bulk of the publication is made up of…