This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

If students are to become proficient at using social skills, parents must be involved in teaching and reinforcing these skills at home. Parent involvement is associated with increased student success, especially when it includes a two-way exchange of information between home and school. As the traditional family has changed, new methods of…

Data-driven learning (DDL), or corpus-based language learning, involves the learner in an exploratory task to discover appropriate expressions or collocates regarding his writing. However, the problematic units of meaning in each learner's writing are so diverse that conventional corpora often prove futile. The search engine Google with the…

Conducted in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classrooms at the university level in China, this quasi-experimental study compared the effects of three different corrective feedback treatments on 72 Chinese learners' use of regular and irregular English past tense. Three classes were randomly assigned to a prompt group, a recast group, or a…

Classroom mathematics in Malta is generally communicated through code-switching between the national language Maltese and the country's second language English. This is because not all mathematical words have Maltese equivalents and furthermore, mathematics textbooks are UK publications. I consider the language used for spoken communication and…

The purpose of this study was to explore the connections between young children's oral language vocabulary and children's reading of written language in beginning reading books. Oral language has been viewed as the foundation for emergent reading development as it provides the semantic base, syntactic base and phonological base for successfully…

This paper describes how Chinese-English bilinguals in Taiwan use their languages in asynchronous computer-mediated communication, specifically, via Bulletin Board System (BBS) and email. The main data includes two types: emails collected from a social network and postings collected from two BBS websites. By examining patterns of language choice…

Higher education administrators are increasingly committed to proactive communication with the parents of their students, but little empirical research exists that demonstrates the effectiveness of such communication. This investigation evaluated the effects of varying frequency of communication by randomly assigning first-year college students…

This study explores the historical relationship between the languages of Basarwa of Botswana and Setswana, in order to understand the dynamics underpinning their appropriation of the Setswana language, as they adjust to their changing livelihoods. The study contributes towards the promotion of a better understanding and awareness of the issues of…

Western historians working in the first half of the twentieth century established a scheme for writing design history that continues to influence the global histories of today. The historians Douglas McMurtrie, Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin and Lawrence Wroth believed that the modern history of visual communication began with the advent and…

This paper aims at analysing the structural relationships among some latent and observed variables related to the assessment of written language performance in 139 fourth grade students of Elementary School selected from nine public schools of the northwest of Mexico. Questionnaires were also applied to the children's parents and teachers. The…

This article addresses the topic of spelling in American English. It discusses the popularity of spelling contests in American schools, and then explains why spelling is so hard. The author then argues how important it is to understand these factors to improve spelling accuracy. The article concludes by identifying the difficulties of language…

The present paper reports some observations on pre-school children's spontaneous as well as adult-supported spelling behaviour and makes comparisons between aspects of these early literacy activities and some features of spellings from mostly twelfth- to fourteenth-century Norwegian runic inscriptions. The runic inscriptions originate from a…

Single trial methods reveal unimpaired free recall of unrelated words in Asperger's syndrome (AS). When repeated trials are used (free recall learning), typical individuals show improved recall over trials, subjective organization of material (SO) and a correlation between free recall and SO. We tested oral (Experiment 1) and written (Experiment…

There are increasing numbers of children with little or no English entering English speaking mainstream lessons. This often leaves them with unique frustrations due to limited English language proficiency and disorientation. Teachers often feel unable to cater sufficiently for these new arrivals. "Teaching English as an Additional Language Ages…