Background: Dyslexia is now generally acknowledged to involve difficulties in phonological processing. However, the links between reading difficulties and speech difficulties remain unclear. Method: In the present study, 17 children with speech difficulties between the ages of four and six were compared to children with a family history of…

The teaching of grammar is discussed from an instrumental point of view: what beneficial effects does such teaching have for students' language abilities (especially writing)? Two ways of approaching grammar teaching are confronted with each other: the learning of explicit rules and meta-linguistic knowledge about language on one hand and learning…

This paper proposes the existence of a cognitive process by which multilinguals who incorporate nontarget lexical items from one non-native language into another may (1) come to identify the lexical item transferred from a source to a guest system as belonging to the guest system and (2) fail to recognise the source of their knowledge in the…

Numerous findings suggest that non-native speech perception undergoes dramatic changes before the infant' s first birthday. Yet the nature and cause of these changes remain uncertain. We evaluated the predictions of several theoretical accounts of developmental change in infants' perception of non-native consonant contrasts. Experiment 1 assessed…

Swain's (1985, 1995, 2000) output hypothesis states that language production is facilitative of second language (L2) learning. An important component of the output hypothesis involves "pushing" learners to produce appropriate, accurate, and complex language (Swain, 1993), which may occur when interlocutors provide learners with negative feedback…

There has been much reflection recently on how language gets used in language classrooms, by language learners and by language teachers. Rather than the perennial debate about target-language use, the author is referring to the growing body of classroom research in the area of linguistics known as pragmatics. Pragmatics, as defined by Crystal…

Narrative understanding has been identified as a primary mode of human thought that informs us about the nature, causes and consequences of human actions and interactions and, as such, underlies social knowledge. Although considerable work has focused on exceptional narrative ability in children aged 12 years old or younger, to date there have…

The main assumption in this article is that the pragmatics of the variety of South African English commonly referred to as black South African English (BSAE) have been shaped, over time, by educated bilinguals, through a transfer of features from African languages. Transfer of syntactic forms, now firmly established in the variety, is evidenced…

This paper examines recent attempts by the Malawi government to introduce local languages into the primary school system and other secondary domains of national life, breaking more than 30 years of Chichewa/English monopoly. In a country where the language policy has essentially established the hegemony of English over indigenous languages, the…

This paper takes a sociocultural approach to exploring the factors that enhance young children's bilingual development. The language excerpts presented were gathered as part of a three-year Early Childhood Centre of Innovation project funded by the New Zealand government. Data gathered in this project challenge Krashen's (1981) position that young…

Reduced verbal working memory capacity has been proposed as a possible account of language impairments in specific language impairment (SLI). Studies have shown, however, that differences in strength of linguistic representations in the form of word frequency affect list recall and performance on verbal working memory tasks. This suggests that…

Empirical studies are essential to improving our understanding of the relationship between accent and pronunciation teaching. However, the study of pronunciation has been marginalized within the field of applied linguistics. As a result, teachers are often left to rely on their own intuitions with little direction. Although some instructors can…

This article explores the identity struggles of a community of Tibetan refugee women in the Indian Himalayas whose educational program combines a traditional Buddhist philosophical curriculum in Tibetan alongside a modern, secular bilingual curriculum in English-Tibetan. Ethnographic and action research data illustrate how negotiations of meanings…

Listening comprehension is a difficult skill for foreign language learners to develop and for their teachers to assess. In designing suitable listening tests, teachers can provide various forms of support to reduce the demands of the task for the test takers. This study investigated the effects of four types of listening support: previewing the…

This article describes the development of an English spelling measure designed to assess the progress made by Spanish-English bilingual children from Grade 2 to Grade 5. Different stages of developing the measure are described, such as selecting the focus features, the prepilot and pilot phases, and the operational version. Two underlying…