Background: Arabic is recognised as diglossic; one manifestation of diglossia is the co-existence of two varieties of the language used in different social settings: standard (or literary) Arabic (StA) and spoken Arabic (SpA). The study investigated the impact of lexical-phonological distance in Arabic (identical, cognate, unique, which are…

Despite a wealth of scholarship documenting its linguistic complexity, students in the United States are rarely encouraged to speak or write in African American Language (AAL) in their primary classrooms. The authors documented how one teacher and his highly diverse second-grade class examined, explored, and experimented with AAL in an…

The ability to flexibly approach the pronunciation of unknown words, or set "for variability", has been shown to contribute to word recognition skills. However, this is the first study that has attempted to teach students strategies for increasing their set for variability. Beginning readers (N = 15) were instructed to correct oral…

The validity of the theory of crucial similarity in language interference is investigated. The theory proposes that when a first and a second language are structurally similar in some aspects, the second language learner will assume similarity in other aspects, causing interference. In this study, the German of first grade students whose teacher…