The aim of this study is to determine the mental images of preschool teachers' perceptions through metaphors about language development. Participating in the study was voluntary and a total of 110 preschool teachers participated in the study. The phenomenology design from the qualitative research designs was administrated in this study, aiming to…

This study aimed to determine the children's skills of comprehending similes. The participants of the research consisted of 120 children that were aged 5-6 and enrolled in preschool education institutions. The data were collected with a 16-item success test. The items in the test were orally administered to the participants during the interviews.…

This case study explores Turkish-English-Arabic multilingual identity sequentially and simultaneously constructed by two refugee siblings raised by their multilingual mother in the family environment where they interact in English and Arabic while they are exposed to Turkish in societal surroundings. By focusing on the multilingualism experiences…

This study aims at analyzing primary school teachers' opinions on cursive writing and their metaphorical perceptions. The study is a qualitative research. Semistructured interview method was employed to identify opinions of the teachers more clearly. The study group of the research study consisted of primary school teachers who worked at public…

The purpose of this work is to determine how widely and in which semantic and morphologic categories, word associations are used by children. There is no study about word associations children use in the acquisition of Turkish as their mother tongue. Participants of the current research consisted of a total of 90 kids between 4.0 and 6.0 years of…

This paper draws on observational studies of three young children in order to demonstrate firstly, their intrinsic motivation to explore systematically through repeated patterns of action or 'schemas'; secondly, how those repeated actions appear and are explored in their emerging language demonstrating their increasing construction of and…

The work of L.S. Vygotsky was popularised in the West between two great waves of educational thought: constructivism and cognitivism. Reception was therefore colored by three metaphors introduced by Jerome Bruner: 'construction', 'scaffolding' and 'narrative'. Narratives were to be characterized by features we call SELF: Subjects, Expectancy and…

This article analyses longitudinal diary data from one infant acquiring German to seek a better understanding of the role of onomatopoeia in early language development. Onomatopoeic words (OWs) are traced over time in relation to their corresponding conventional forms (CWs), and an analysis of their phonological transitions is considered in…

Sociocultural and dialogic theories of education have identified the need to integrate both pedagogical content and language knowledge into teachers' professional development to promote effective interaction with students about subject content. In this intervention study, a meta-perspective on language was developed to understand how experienced…

Shared reading represents an established practice to foster preschool vocabulary development, particularly when coupled with explicit instruction in word meanings. However, a question remains as to whether explicit word definitions detract from story delivery and hence language learning. Accordingly, this study compared explicit versus…

The hermeneutics of fairytales, understood as a new way to get their deep significances and therapeutic effects on children by the process of psychic conflicts awareness, represents a frequent topic in the current research, a real source of inspiration for those delivering literature for children or for those using fairytales for therapeutic…

In Romanian preschool settings, there is a tendency to use abstract strategies in language-learning activities. The present study explored if strategies based on an embodied cognition approach facilitate learning more than traditional strategies that progress from concrete to abstract. Twenty-five children between 4 and 5 years of age listened to…

This article defines the concepts related to symbolic and sign representations, cognition and learning in the early years. The first study experiment of teaching 33 preschool children (19 boys and 14 girls; M = 68, 5 months) the notion of rainbow phenomenon proved the equal effectiveness of the use of both sign and symbolic tools. The second study…

This article presents the CercleS European Language Portfolio for university students in its translated Italian form. The illustration of the translation process takes inspiration from Rudyard Kipling's poem "I keep six honest serving men" and answers the questions What? Why? When? How? Where? and Who? in explaining how the task was…

Idiomatic expressions pose substantial learning difficulties for learners across languages and tend to be acquired later in the course of language development both in L1 and L2. A number of factors have been identified as contributing to this difficulty. However, cross-linguistic studies on figurative language acquisition are still rare. The…