The morpho-syllabic Japanese writing system consists of the phonetic scripts of hiragana and katakana, the logographic kanji derived from Chinese characters and the less well researched romaji based on the Roman alphabet. In four experiments we investigated the speed with which Japanese college students read, named, and transcribed romaji as…

The effect of irregular English orthography (spelling) on foundation literacy, and in particular on alphabetic decoding, is discussed within the context of the orthographic depth hypothesis. A method for circumventing the retarding effects of traditional English orthography, based on the support provided for Chinese pupils learning their…

Mother tongue is the language that a person learns in the society he/she lives especially from his/her mother by imitating herself which begins from the period of infancy and also mother tongue is the language that he/she expresses him/herself best. Vardar (1980:20) defines mother tongue as, "[Mother tongue] is the language which is learned for…

This paper reports findings from a large-scale evaluation undertaken to explore the impact of the "linguistic phonics approach" (LPA) on young children's reading. The LPA is a systematic and applied programme that differs from traditional phonics programmes. For example, rather than ask children to look at letters and speculate on the…

Pre-colonial traditional societies in Sub-Saharan Africa were mostly oral societies whose languages were not written. In the African context, especially, it was clear that the mostly oral traditions of these societies' languages were neither being appreciated nor promoted as media of communication, or means of education by the invading Europeans.…

This paper describes multiple Estonian-Russian language contacts in Estonia. For synchronic microsociolinguistic research it is usual to concentrate on the impact of a sociolinguistically dominant language A on an immigrant/minority language B. In the Soviet setting, the dominant language was usually Russian (despite Russians being a minority).…

Makin and Jones Diaz (2002) suggest that young children's early literacy is most strongly supported when early childhood educators, children's families, and the wider community develop shared understandings about literacy--what counts, what is valued and validated, and whose voices are heard and whose voices are silent. Researchers such as Haas…

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset…

In this article, I examine how transnational students' educational trajectories are shaped by social relations and identity formation as developed in part through the medium of school-based bilingual literacy practices. By examining the educational trajectory of one young woman at an unusual, bilingual high school, I demonstrate that, in critical…

Background/Context: Culturally authoritative texts such as Text Revision of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual-IV [DSM-IV-TR](American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2004) describe literate impossibility for individuals with disability labels associated with severe developmental disabilities. Our qualitative research challenges the…

The writing performance of 64 elementary school children with a history of specific language impairment was examined to evaluate both the nature of the children's difficulties with writing and the relationship between oral language, reading, and writing. Children were assessed at age 8 on a range of language, literacy, and cognitive measures and…

The traditional spelling curriculum emphasized that pupils learn to spell a specific set of words through memorization. However, major problems existed pertaining to using that method of teaching. Pupils soon forgot the correct spelling of memorized words. Educational psychologists have long advocated that pupils perceive knowledge as being…

Some of the difficulties faced by second language learners who are continuing to acquire English at the same time as they start to read simple extended English texts are illustrated. Specific focus is on the question of how writers of early reading material can best help such learners to understand the relationship between spoken and written…

Resuscitating Charles Darwin's language from historians' emphatic denigration of the written word serves as an example to demonstrate what the English discipline can accomplish in recovering cultural heritage. Michael Ghiselin, an evolutionary anatomist, suggests that scholars must concentrate on the ideas, not the language, Darwin employed. Yet…

The traditional theory of Chinese writing is that it is divorced from the language because as a non-alphabetic system, it cannot represent real speech. Chinese writing, however, is a functional linguistic system in its own right. Writing does not need to be totally dependent on speech, but can be related either to the phonological or the semantic…