Three tests were conducted to contrast the ability of bilingual and monolingual children to label and relabel objects. The findings show that bilingual subjects were significantly better than monolingual subjects, supporting the view that preschool bilingual education stimulates children's cognitive development, and enhances their self-concept.…

A sociocultural approach takes into account how literacy is acquired and used in social contexts. Socially determined meanings of literacy practices and the different ways cultures are valued reflect tensions between practical consciousness and official or dominant consciousness. Literacy education should recognize literacy as a cultural practice…

Explains the notion of "individual multilingualism." Multilingual behavior and multilingualism are considered as mental states, and questions about whether there are qualitative neuropsychological differences between multi- and mono-linguals are raised. Multilingualism in small children is briefly discussed. A reference list of 44 items is…

Among Gaelic-English bilinguals in East Sunderland, Scotland, code choice is made according to interlocutor. When the chosen code is Gaelic, the community norm for rendering direct quotations within a narrative is to produce them in Gaelic, regardless of which language was used originally or whether the quoted person is capable of speaking Gaelic.…

The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with…

This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations--English-Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English-Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups…

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of bilinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and…

In this paper, the author explores the views of a group whose perspectives have not often been included in discussions of new directions for foreign language education--students. Drawing from a larger ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of the nature of culture learning for one group of college students and their teacher, this paper presents…

The verbal organizing abilities of the bilingual, multilingual, and monolingual, as measured by four subscales of the Goyer Organization of Ideas Test (GOIT), were investigated. A total of 163 subjects from 5 universities having high populations of multilingual students were administered the GOIT. Bilinguals were not as effective on the sequential…

The problems and advantages of being bilingual are discussed, along with the personality of bilinguals and the different forms of bilingualism. It is concluded that the optimum situation is passive bilingualism, i.e. reading and understanding various languages, accompanied by active monolingualism, i.e. speaking and writing only one language.…

Examines assumptions about dictionaries, especially the bilingual dictionary, and suggests ways of integrating the monolingual dictionary into the second-language instructional process. Findings indicate that the monolingual dictionary can coexist with bilingual dictionaries within a foreign-language course if the latter are appropriately used as…

This review of "Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights?" by Tove Skutrabb-Kangas (Erlbaum 2002) finds the book a useful guide for examining language policies in education but suggests its argument is weakened by the invisibility of teachers in the analysis and the loaded and inflammatory language used.…

A review of the status of research on literacy concludes that vagueness and ambiguity of definition, measurement, methodology, and evaluation continue to grip the large body of literacy research, debates, and programs, with the underlying assumptions made about the concept of monolingual societies resulting in overly simplified and speculative…

French second language instruction in Australian schools is seen as endangered by political and economic forces favoring other "priority" languages. Arguments in favor of continued French language instruction are presented. (MSE)

A comparison of the performance of age- and intelligence-matched bilingual (n=46) and monolingual (n=38) six- and seven-year olds on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities indicated that the bilinguals had significantly inferior performance in tests of the visual-motor channel, analogous auditory-vocal tests, and representative level. (18…