Mother-tongue teachers teach argumentation analysis. To this end, among other things, they use a stylistic meta-language, i.e. the tropes and figures of style, to analyse arguments as well as more aesthetic communication. The best-known trope is the metaphor. In this article it is argued that a more pragmatic view on the related figure metonymy…

Heritage language (HL) is a linguistic system that arises in the context of early childhood bilingualism, both sequential and simultaneous, when one of the languages is not fully acquired. The performance of speech acts in HLs is yet to be understood, and this dissertation is a first step in this direction. The study investigates the pragmatic…

This dissertation presents an approach for a productive way forward in the study of language acquisition, sealing the rift between claims of an innate linguistic hypothesis space and powerful domain general statistical inference. This approach breaks language acquisition into its component parts, distinguishing the input in the environment from…

Teachers' professionalization is promoted by language education that includes mother tongue across the curriculum, foreign languages and professional language. Aim of the research is to analyze views of newly qualified pedagogues of social work on languages of professionalization. The object of the present research is views of newly qualified…

Transfer of sounds from L1 to L2 can obviously lead to inappropriate pronunciations, but assumptions about the effects such transfer may have on native listeners are often based on intuition or casual observation. This paper investigates the effects of direct transfer of four Danish vowels into English through a forced-choice word identification…

Languages instantiate many different kinds of dependencies, some holding between adjacent elements and others holding between nonadjacent elements. In the domain of phonology-phonotactics, sensitivity to adjacent dependencies has been found to appear between 6 and 10 months. However, no study has directly established the emergence of sensitivity…

This article draws on data from an ethnographic multiple-case study on the identity, positioning, and interactions of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) students in regular Canadian high school Spanish classes. Interview and classroom observational data are discursively analyzed to reveal the presence of a form of language ideology that equates…

Texts have a crucial place in language education and probably they are the most important means of education. Students at the primary and secondary education ages mostly read narrative texts like short stories, poems and fictional books. This study attempts to assess value transfer in narrative texts at the secondary education textbooks. Our study…

The longitudinal predictive power of four important reading-related skills (phonological skills, rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness) to Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) was examined in a 3-year longitudinal study among 251 Chinese elementary students. Rapid naming, orthographic skills, and…

Emotional words are better remembered than neutral words in the first language. Ferre, Garcia, Fraga, Sanchez-Casas and Molero (2010) found this emotional effect also for second language words by using an encoding task focused on emotionality. The aim of the present study was to test whether the same effect can also be observed with encoding tasks…

Spoken language (unimodal) interpreters often prefer to interpret from their non-dominant language (L2) into their native language (L1). Anecdotally, signed language (bimodal) interpreters express the opposite bias, preferring to interpret from L1 (spoken language) into L2 (signed language). We conducted a large survey study ("N" =…

The language problems faced by migrants may be more complex when they come from a minority language group in their homeland. The new arrivals may find that there are few, or even no, speakers of their language in the community to which they have moved. Then decisions have to be made as to whether to attempt to maintain the native language and also…

This article reports empirical findings from an ongoing investigation into the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonemic contrasts. Specifically, we consider the status and role of the phenomenon of hypercorrection in the various stages through which L2 learners develop and internalize a target language (TL) contrast. We adopt the prevailing…

This is a naturalistic study of the development of language in Hebrew-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS) and children with Down syndrome (DS), whose MLU extended from 1[multiplied by]0 to 4[multiplied by]4. Developmental curves over the entire span of data collection revealed minor differences between children with WS, children with DS,…

This phenomenological study investigated the lived experiences of identity development of Chinese graduate students in the United States. Through in-depth interviews with 15 participants at a Midwestern research university, the study found that the majority of Chinese graduate students came with a strong student identity that conflated with…