There is a paucity of Vygotskian influenced inner speech research in relation to the reading process. Those few studies which have examined Vygotskian inner speech from a reading perspective tend to support the notion that inner speech is an important covert function that is crucial to the reading process and to reading acquisition in general.…

This article investigates verb placement, especially Verb second (V2), in post-puberty second language (L2) learners of two closely related Germanic V2 languages: Swedish and German. Hakansson, "et al." (2002) have adduced data from first language (L1) Swedish-speaking learners of German in support of the claim that the syntactic property of V2…

Background: Past research has shown that watching a subtitled foreign movie (i.e. foreign language in the soundtrack and native language in the subtitles) leads to considerable foreign-language vocabulary acquisition; however, acquisition of the grammatical rules has failed to emerge. Aims: The aim of this study was to obtain evidence for the…

Two studies investigated hearing-impaired students' ability to derive lexical and syntactic information about unknown words embedded in short passages of text. Implications for explaining, and trying to ameliorate, the well-documented vocabulary limitations of hearing-impaired students are discussed. (38 references) (JL)

Examines whether manually coded English (MCE) sign language systems are learnable. Reading achievement and expressive English skills of deaf students educated using only a MCE sign system were examined. Deaf students had expressive English skills comparable to hearing students in respect to syntactical and lexical skills but were deficient in…

This case study deals with language awareness (LA) oriented instruction in the Irish language classroom, based on qualitative-type research conducted in a class of 21 English-medium secondary students studying Irish as a subject. Having outlined the general background to the teaching of Irish in secondary schools, the first section of the paper…

Several states have now implemented policies restricting basic writers' access to four-year universities, and the students most likely to be affected are African American, Latino, and nonnative English speakers. The pressure to speed students' mastery of standard written English, along with the trend toward more explicit instruction in second…

This article reports on the results of a longitudinal investigation of the reading development of a sample of 824 children (406 girls, 418 boys). The sample included 689 native English-speaking (L1) children and 135 English-language learners (ELLs) representing 33 different native languages. In kindergarten and 4th grade, children's word reading,…

This article considers the comprehension of tense-aspect markers remote past BIN and habitual be by 3- to 5-year-old developing African American English (AAE)-speaking children and their Southwest Louisiana Vernacular English (SwLVE)-speaking peers. Overall both groups of children associated BIN with the distant past; however, the AAE-speaking…

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of syntactic complexity and task demands on construction of utterances using picture communication symbols by participants from 3 age groups with no communication disorders. Method: Participants were 30 children (7;0 [years;months] to 8;11), 30 teenagers (12;0 to 13;11), and 30 adults (18 years and…

This study examined whether a younger starting age is advantageous in a situation of minimal exposure to an instructed foreign language ([less than or equal] 4 hours classroom contact per week). Previous theoretical and empirical studies indicated there should be no advantage for an earlier start. Japanese college students who started studying…

An analysis of subject placement in Italian argues that placement is not determined entirely by case, but also partly by interpretational considerations. The crucial step in the argument is that there are independent well-formedness conditions on discourse structures and that the apparent interpretational effects on preposed subjects of…

This study analyzes the discourse structures of one text type in Central Bontoc, one of eight minority Philippine languages. The text explains the Innana rituals, a complex of six rituals held annually in Bontoc villages shortly after the planting of the rice crop. The rituals are considered extremely important because they are believed to help…

An analysis of the use of the English particle "also" in discourse is presented. First, previous analyses of "also" and of related particles "even, only" are outlined and critiqued. It is argued that these analyses draw inadequate conclusions about the particles' usage patterns and meaning. A formulation of the…

This report is an overview of some of the common features of African languages. It is difficult to present a concise and comprehensive summary of the features that are likely to be found in a group of languages as large and as totally unrelated as are the one to two thousand languages found on the continent of Africa. Therefore, representative…