The present study aimed to investigate the contribution of oral language skills, linguistic skills, and transcription skills to Chinese written composition among Grade 4 students in Hong Kong. Measures assessing verbal working memory, oral language skills, linguistic skills (i.e., syntactic skills and discourse skills), transcription skills (i.e.,…

This paper presents a comparative curricular inquiry of teacher education programs of Chinese as a foreign language in China and Australia. While there is an increasing demand for qualified Chinese language teachers both within China and Western countries, pre-service teacher training is regarded as one of the major factors in impeding success in…

Despite considerable effort, progress in "closing the gap" in literacy and in school retention in Indigenous communities is very slow. The reasons for continuing problems are many and various and are generally known at social and environmental levels. In this paper, I identify and emphasize the importance of proximal factors in…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

According to the Michigan State University (MSU) course catalog, Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRA) 125--Writing: The Ethnic and Racial Experience is a themed-based Tier I (first-year) writing course that focuses on "drafting, revising, and editing compositions derived from readings on the experience of American ethnic and racial…

Purpose: This study provides milestones for phonological development in African American English (AAE) speakers who are learning Mainstream American English (MAE) as a second dialect. Method: The Dialect Sensitive Language Test (DSLT; H. Seymour, T. Roeper, & J. G. de Villiers, 2000) was administered to a nationwide sample of typically developing…

In six experiments with English-learning infants, we examined the effects of variability in voice and foreign accent on word recognition. We found that 9-month-old infants successfully recognized words when two native English talkers with dissimilar voices produced test and familiarization items (Experiment 1). When the domain of variability was…

This dissertation addresses the variable nature of the linguistic phenomenon known as Differential Object Marking (DOM) as it is manifested in Spanish. More commonly known in the literature as the personal "a" or the accusative "a", this phenomenon has been attributed primarily to marking animate, predominantly human, direct…

In Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), the gentive (G) and dative/locative (DL) cases exhibit adjectival long-form allomorphy (ALFA). The genitive -"og" -"oga" and the DL -"om" -"ome" -"omu" stand in free variation, inasmuch as when one form is substituted for another the truth value of an utterance…

In Spanish, each uttered phrase, depending on its use, has one of a variety of intonation patterns. For example, a phrase such as "Maria viene manana" "Mary is coming tomorrow" can be used as a declarative or as an absolute interrogative (a yes/no question) depending on the intonation pattern that a speaker produces. …

The present investigation examines possible social and linguistic factors that influence forms of address used in Chilean Spanish with various interlocutors. A characteristic of the Spanish of Chile is the use of a variety of forms of address for the second person singular, "tu", "vos", and "usted", with corresponding…

The present article argues that the social category of "standardisation" has been instrumental in creating a Foucaultian discourse archive governing what may and what may not be stated on the subject of the history of English. It analyses the question of how language attitudes have been instrumental in creating the myths that have driven…

English as taught in city schools does not always reflect the Englishes city students travel with. Their urban English landscape is enriched by a procession of many voices that march in various directions in, around, and through the monuments of the city. These languages--Englishes, in this case--which have been traded on through various public…

Purpose: To examine lexical knowledge in children through a fast mapping task. Method: This study compared the performance of 60 African American English-speaking and general American English-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years. They were presented with a comprehension task involving the fast mapping of novel verbs in 4 different…

Toward the end of their first year of life, infants' overly specified word representations are thought to give way to more abstract ones, which helps them to better cope with variation not relevant to word identity (e.g., voice and affect). This developmental change may help infants process the ambient language more efficiently, thus enabling…