Reports evidence from a longitudinal study showing that the relationship between children's sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration and their success in reading is highly specific and cannot be accounted for in terms of general language ability. (GLR)

Traces the formulation and norming of a questionnaire constructed for the self-reporting of English-as-a-Second-Language students on their preferred perceptual learning styles, focusing on the problem of reliability and validity in survey design. (CB)

Analyzes the developing language of the author's preschool-age daughter to examine the role of language use in two different cultural contexts. Discusses code switching, and the role of narratives. (SR)

While children aged 1;10 and 2;1 show only a modest rate of mapping novel nouns onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects, children aged 1;4 and 1;8 show a high rate. Two studies with young 2-year olds found the noun-mapping preference prevalent, but unless initial choices are strongly reinforced, increase in salience of familiar kinds lures…

A study of 5-year olds' ability to distinguish promises from predictions was suspected to have achieved its results due to methodological problems. A similar study with 32 children ages 5 to 6 that used several variations of the previous study's procedures was found to have similar results, suggesting the earlier findings were an accurate…

A study investigated the effects of varying the morphological characteristics of input on comprehension and input processing. Nine targeted subjunctive verbs in a text were substituted with infinitives and a nonsense morpheme. Passage comprehension, measured by recall, was significantly lower for the correct, subjunctive forms than for incorrect…

Describes the development and organization of the Colt (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching) observation scheme and Lyster and Ranta's (1997) error treatment model, instruments including predetermined categories to describe features of instructional input and interaction in second language classrooms. Concludes that the choice of…

Discusses two complementary traditions in the study of communication and social context and shows how one researcher's theory of context influences the methodologies he or she adopts. Reviews substantive findings of sociolinguistic researchers in four main areas of second-language acquisition and use: interlanguage variation, cross-cultural…

Discusses the process, characteristics, and consequence of codified Korean English that serves as the endonormative standard for Korean-English education. (Author/VWL)

Six children were studied from the age of 6 months to 1 year and 6 months to chart their developing comprehension vocabularies from the first to the 100th word. Observational data were used in the first instance to identify newly comprehended words and then controlled testing was carried out for each word to confirm and expand the observational…

Examines whether or not learning unknown words in a context is useful to Japanese high school students. Particular focus is on the learning effect of unknown word inference strategies in reading.(Author/VWL)

Uses case alteration (cAse ALteRaTiOn) to investigate effects of first-language (L1) orthographic characteristics on word recognition in English as a second language (ESL). Finds magnitude of case alteration effect for naming tasks was significantly larger for ESL participants whose L1 was not alphabetic. Suggests that L1 orthographic features…

Argues that applied linguistics, as the interdisciplinary field that mediates between the theory and practice of language acquisition and use, is the overarching field that includes second language acquisition (SLA) and SLA-related domains of research. (Author/VWL)

Presents three case studies conducted by an English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language teacher to illustrate how action research can be considered as a methodological option rather than a research method for conducting language classroom research. (Author/VWL)

Addresses the question of social motivation for codeswitching (CS) as well as the more narrowly linguistic question of structural constraints, based on six recordings of conversations between a pair of bilingual siblings over a period of four years. Unmarked CS, emblematic of the children's dual identity as members of an Estonian family and an…