This article discusses repeated storybook reading using adult scaffolding and phonological awareness strategies to facilitate oral and written language in children with language delays. The discussion is framed around common questions asked by educators considering repeated storybook reading as an instructional method. (Contains references.)…

Recommends that English teachers encourage students to explore interaction of popular culture and oral communication. Discusses similarities between personal letters and contemporary recordings. Identifies over 60 letter-related song titles that have used postal imagery to depict a variety of human circumstances and lists over 20 references.…

Describes some stable syntactic features of Swazi English. Discusses, among others, the use of the modal auxiliary "must," the use of "as to," the conflation of the emphatic "do" with the simple past tense, and dangling modifiers. (Author/JL)

Discusses whether the "Economist" magazine is a suitable source for the analysis of the language of economics, and argues that its discourse is essentially journalistic and very different from that of a textbook. (Author/VWL)

Describes plagiarism as it is commonly understood in the United States and is defined for young researchers by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Applies these ideas to three cases of plagiarism by Chinese scientists reported in the journal "Science." Discusses implications for English-as-a-Second-Language instruction. (Author/JL)

Preschool children (N=38) from low-income households enrolled in Head Start were evaluated for written language awareness. Analysis indicated significant gaps in print, word, graphic, and metalinguistic awareness. Lowest performance was found in children's ability to identify contextualized print within illustrations and their understanding of the…

This study provides insights into the benefits of phoneme awareness intervention for children with complex communication needs (CCN). The specific aims of the study were: (1) to determine whether phoneme awareness skills can be successfully trained in children with CCN; and (2) to observe any transfer effects to phoneme awareness tasks not…

Until American Calvinist missionaries created a Hawaiian alphabet and writing system after their arrival to the Hawaiian islands in 1819, all Kanaka Maoli literature was oral. By inventing a Hawaiian alphabet, the missionaries were able to teach Kanaka Maoli reading and writing; by the early 1830s the first missionary-controlled printing press was…

This study investigates connections between teacher and student attitudes related to the delayed (or immediate) introduction of Japanese script in the Japanese language classroom. Two groups of students completed questionnaires concerning their attitudes toward the immediate or delayed introduction of Japanese script and the use of romaji…

The evaluation of developmental interventions has been hampered by a lack of practical, reliable, and objective developmental assessment systems. This article describes the construction of a domain-general computerized developmental assessment system for texts: the Lexical Abstraction Assessment System (LAAS). The LAAS provides assessments of the…

This study investigated written language in the form of personal and formal letters written by 10 people who sustained a stroke and 10 people who sustained traumatic brain injury, and compared their performance with 15 non brain-damaged people. In order to explore the writing skills of these individuals from a sociocultural perspective, a…

This study explores the ways in which academic writers employ expressions of attitude in the construction of evaluative stance in the introductory sections of research papers. The study draws on the theoretical base of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1994, Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), and in particular on Appraisal theory as a…

Do different L1 (first language) writing systems differentially affect word identification in English as a second language (ESL)? Wang, Koda, and Perfetti [Cognition 87 (2003) 129] answered yes by examining Chinese students with a logographic L1 background and Korean students with an alphabetic L1 background for their phonological and orthographic…

The Touo language is a non-Austronesian language spoken on Rendova Island (Western Province, Solomon Islands). First language speakers of Touo are typically multilingual, and are likely to speak other (Austronesian) vernaculars, as well as Solomon Island Pijin and English. There is no institutional support of literacy in Touo: schools function in…

This study explored the development of children's early understanding of visual and orthographic aspects of print and how this is related to early reading acquisition. A total of 474 children, ages 48 to 83 months, completed standardized measures of phonological awareness and early reading skills. They also completed experimental tasks that tapped…