In this article, we focus on instructional support for 91 students who speak African American Vernacular English and who are at high risk for not passing the required state exams. We profile the instruction that was provided and the results from that instruction, providing examples of how students' language was scaffolded such that they could code…

The situation once described by Hoffmann (1985), in which children grow up exposed to three languages from an early age, is a reality for an increasing number of families. In Europe--as elsewhere--greater mobility is leading to greater numbers of mixed-language couples (Piller 2002), and, by extension, multilingual families. For such families,…

This study explores how a group of learners of English as a second language (ESL) criticize in everyday situations compared to the native speaker (NS) with a view to expanding the range of speech acts under inquiry in the interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) literature. Data were collected from five NSs of New Zealand English and five intermediate…

The present study explores the use of conjunctions in simple versus complex argumentative tasks performed by second language (L2) learners as a specific measure for the amount of reasoning involved in task performance. The Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2005) states that an increase in cognitive task complexity promotes improvements in L2…

This study investigates contextual features surrounding the use of a first language (L1) in a Japanese university English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) course during peer interaction in the extended preparation phase leading up to two oral presentation tasks (OP1 and OP3), performed seven months apart. Interaction data were analysed in terms of the…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingually raised children in the Netherlands, who receive literacy instruction in their second language only, show an advantage on Dutch phoneme-awareness tasks compared with monolingual Dutch-speaking children. Language performance of a group of 47 immigrant first-grade children with various…

Students with writing difficulties and learning disabilities struggle with many aspects of the writing process, including use of sentence-level skills. This literature review summarizes results from 19 published articles that used single-case or group-experimental and quasi-experimental designs to investigate effects of intervention on the…

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, such…

Although much research has gone into the sociolinguistics of the linguistic landscape (space for and language of public signs) in the "peripheral," non-native contexts of English Language use and users, none has been specifically devoted to a Nigerian context. This dissertation is intended to fill this wide gap. Focusing on the Ibadan…

This article reports on a research process where focussed reflection on pharmacist-patient simulations led to meta-pragmatic awareness and directions for pedagogical practice. The research participants were third-year EAL pharmacy students, who were practising being pharmacists, and pharmacy staff members, who played the part of patients. Analysis…

English verbs have built-in properties that determine how they behave syntactically and generate appropriate meaning associated. With these inherent properties some verbs can fill in only in certain syntactic structures and some in others. The observation of the verb "COOK" using English corpus has revealed its lexical properties…

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated…

This study investigated the effects of mobile phone text-messaging method (predictive and multi-press) and experience (in texters and non-texters) on children's textism use and understanding. It also examined popular claims that the use of text-message abbreviations, or "textese" spelling, is associated with poor literacy skills. A sample of 86…

Turkish migrants are the largest national group in Germany. Nevertheless, neither in music psychology research nor in intercultural research can empirical data on the music preferences of Turkish-German primary schoolchildren in the migrational context be found. This study thus examined the music preference responses of children with Turkish…

This exploration of the languages of contact in the North American British-US borderlands in the period between 1783 and 1860 provides insights into the types of extended contact that occurred in the areas north of 42[degrees] and south of 50[degrees]. Although multilingualism was the norm in the Old Northwest and the old Oregon Territory during…