This study was conducted with both Bulgarian and Turkish eight-grade students, who studied in two different middle schools. It was aimed to understand Bulgarian, Romanian and Turkish students' metaphors on STEM disciplines. 18 Bulgarian, 23 Romanian and 20 Turkish students voluntarily participated in this study. Within this context, four separate…

The Norwegian language has two written standards, Bokmål (majority variety) and Nynorsk (minority variety), and children receive their schooling in one or other of them. Pupils schooled in Nynorsk acquire the Bokmål variety simultaneously through extracurricular exposure and thus develop what may be termed "bidialectal literacy". In this…

All native speakers of Arabic read in a language variety that is remarkably distant from the one they use in everyday speech. The study tested the impact of this distance on reading accuracy and fluency by comparing reading of Standard Arabic (StA) words, used in StA only, versus Spoken Arabic (SpA) words, used in SpA too, among Arabic native…

This study investigated the use of text-message abbreviations (textisms) in Australian adolescents and young adults, and relations between textism use and literacy abilities. Fifty-two high school students aged 13-15 years, and 53 undergraduates aged 18-24 years, all users of predictive texting, translated conventional English sentences into…

In South Africa, as in many parts of postcolonial Africa, English dominates the political economy and as a result is the medium of instruction chosen by the majority of South African schools, despite the fact that most learners do not have the opportunity to acquire English to the levels necessary for effective engagement with the curriculum.…