A large and growing number of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in the US and around the world have the potential to develop bilingualism and biliteracy if supported in their immediate environment. At the forefront in focusing exclusively on biliteracy development in early childhood across a variety of languages, this…

Few challenges facing America today are as vital as improving the educational attainment of low social economic and English Language Learners (language minority children). The United States' educational reform has brought forth numerous initiatives throughout the past decades to address the "Achievement Gap" between Latino students and their Anglo…

The relationship between technology and English as a foreign language (EFL) learning and teaching is one of the significant research areas, and the "Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology" ("TOJET") publishes research papers on educational technologies addressing various topics related to education. This article aims…

When looking at virtual environments and language learning we can take our pick where to begin. Should it be technology or pedagogy? I will use the pedagogical concept of learner autonomy to approach virtual environments in different ways. First, there is a need to look at interaction and online interaction; second, reflection as an essential…

The purpose of this study was to examine the perception of vowels by speakers of English and Malayalam, native language of the state of Kerala, India. Three groups of subjects participated in the study, native speakers of English (L1E), native speakers of Malayalam (L1M) and native speakers of Malayalam who learnt English as a second language…

The role of homophony in language change and in child morphological acquisition has often been made recourse to. Regarding the former it has been proposed that the threat of homophony can prevent a sound change from going to completion. With respect to the latter, it has been vaguely and contradictorily claimed that homophonous morphological…

This paper proposes a technique for teaching decoding of the Arabic language to Arab dyslexic students following the multisensory, systematic, explicit phonics approach and based in part on the Orton-Gillingham approach. This technique emphasizes vocabulary controlled, font-modified, cumulative, color-coded reading materials, and orthographic…

This study investigates whether two different means of learning the word sequence "despite the fact (that)" lead to differential outcomes of the acquisition of the grammatical structure imbedded in the word string which is, due to L1 transfer, especially problematic for Chinese learners of English. The participants of the study were randomly…

The notion that academic writing is not only a conventional entity but also carries the representation of the writer has been supported by several researchers. Few studies have explored identity representation in language across two written cultures, such as English and Spanish, although Spanish might be a language of interest for non-native…

We report the results from two experiments investigating proficient Japanese-speaking learners' processing of reflexive object pronouns in English as a second language (L2). Experiment 1 used a timed grammaticality judgement task to assess learners' sensitivity to binding Principle A under processing pressure, and Experiment 2 investigated the…

This paper is based on an analysis of interviews, conducted at three primary schools in Melbourne, which sought to explore the determinants of code-switching between English and Chinese. Specifically, it examined school education and other specific possible determinants of code switching amongst Chinese-Australian bilingual children. The specific…

This article describes the history and continuing development of Vygotsky-inspired sociocultural theories (SCT) and their application in second and foreign language research. In particular, I emphasize the intellectual traditions out of which SCT emerged and the relation of SCT to other critical scholarship. The discussion includes long-standing…

Previous research has examined children's ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1 ; 9 to 2 ; 10 (N=34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In, children added "-ed" and "-ing" to novel stems, and dropped them from novel…

Lardiere (2003), in her reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001), justifies the use of suppliance in obligatory contexts as a method of analysis in the investigation of the second language (L2) acquisition of past tense, and claims that such a method is characteristic of previous studies that have proposed the Aspect Hypothesis. It is argued here…

This paper renews the call for greater interest in applied work to deal with the obstacles faced in formal education by speakers of creoles (such as Hawaii Creole and Jamaican Creole) and minority dialects (such as African American English). It starts off with an update on developments in the use of these vernacular languages in educational…