A large body of research has been conducted on the requests employed by monolingual children, whilst knowledge about the requests uttered by bilingual children has remained scarce. To address this issue, this paper, for the first time in the literature, focuses on the request strategies and purposes employed by preschool children bilingual in…

Acquiring a second language (L2) has been increasingly recognized to be an ongoing developmental process, one that progresses in a fluid and non-linear fashion (Larsen-Freeman, 2015). Instead of operating like a mechanical black box that parses incoming linguistic information and outputs oral/written language indiscriminately, the learner's…

English language learners are increasingly present in early care environments. In 2005, for example, 14.7 percent of children in nonparental care in the United States came from homes where only one parent or neither parent spoke English. Approximately 29 percent of children participating in Head Start programs spoke a language other than English.…

This study examined (1) the potential influence of oral language characteristics of two languages that bilingual children acquire on their PA and (2) the relationship of PA in L1 with PA and literacy skills in L2, using data from Korean-English bilingual children. Thirty three Korean-English bilingual children, composed of two subsamples from two…

Reports on an experiment designed to compare the linguistic ability of English-speaking students of French to that of native French-speaking students, through sentence repetition, in order to draw some conclusions regarding approximative grammars. (AM)

Discusses the reported patterns of address of first language and second language Welsh-speaking children. Concludes that it's possible that by adjusting their speech to accommodate the interlanguage of the L2 speakers, the L1 speakers lessen the need for the L2 speakers to go beyond a certain level of competence. (SED)

It is a matter of debate whether the two differentiated grammatical systems in a bilingual child develop autonomously, or whether there is interdependence and in what areas (Genesee, 2001; Meisel, 2001). Extensive research is being carried out in the emergence of the two grammars, but not much attention has been given to the development of…

Describes a study undertaken to assess interference from two languages for learners of French. Suggests that susceptibility to interference is related to a number of factors, such as level of proficiency in the target language, and the degree and type of similarity between the target and the base language. (MES)

A study investigated how Hispanic bilingual students' knowledge of Spanish vocabulary and awareness of Spanish-English cognates influence comprehension of English expository text. The subjects, 74 upper elementary school students literate in both Spanish and English, were tested for vocabulary knowledge in both languages. After reading four…

Using the notion of interlanguage, this paper illustrates how a useful characterization may be obtained of some aspects of the English of Shona speakers. The interference hypothesis in language learning is demoted, while the interlanguage hypothesis in which interference plays a part, is promoted. Application of the interlanguage concept…

Assists teachers involved in bilingual instruction in improving their understanding of two aspects of bilingual development: interlanguage and of code-switching. Both are natural and creative outgrowths of being bilingual, i.e., alternative forms created by the cognitive/conceptual synthesis of two languages. (30 references) (CK)

The results of two experimental studies of interference in German-Swedish bilingual and trilingual high school students are presented. Both were developmental studies with length of residence in Sweden as the main independent variable. The purpose was to follow the developmental changes in intra- and interlingual interference and to find out if…

A study investigated the extent to which oral language forms influence the written products of Mexican-American students attending an inner city school in a low income neighborhood. For the study, writing samples from 78 third grade and 92 sixth grade students were analyzed for Spanish, interlanguage, and Chicano English features. (Interlanguage…

A review of the literature on child language reveals little research on overgeneralization in the speech of the bilingual child. Questions arise regarding (1) the existence of interlingual overgeneralizations, and (2) the possibility that monolingual deviations and bilingual code switching might be forms of overgeneralization. Because a model for…

This study investigates the development of two levels of morphological knowledge that contribute to Spanish-English bilingual students' ability to recognize cognates: the ability to recognize a cognate stem within a suffixed English word, and knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes (e.g., the fact that English…