This book fills a gap in early developmental psychology by providing a critical reconsideration of the status of artifact objects as protagonists of children's actions and communication. The main thesis explored in the book is that objects are part of the material culture; they have public functions and social meanings that are transmitted by the members of the community. Their meanings are not "naturally" given, and children are not born knowing what to do with objects. All chapters analy...

Introducing Second Language Acquisition: Perspectives and Practices represents a clear and concise introduction to the main concepts, issues, and debates in second language acquisition studies aimed specifically at undergraduates encountering the topic for the first time.Follows six fictitious language learners throughout the text whose stories serve to introduce various concepts and issuesContains specific chapters on first language acquisition and bilingu...

Part of the Communication and Language Intervention SeriesOne third of young children living in the United States are dual language learners, and the number of bilingual students is on the rise in countries around the world.* Prepare SLPs and educators to support this growing population with the third edition of this bestselling textbook, developed by three...

The creation of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has given rise to interest and debate among policy makers, testers, teachers and researchers alike in the reliability and feasibility of the assessment of second language (L2) proficiency. This volume brings together concrete ideas on identifying and measuring L2 proficiency from different branches of SLA research (psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, corpus-based, applied linguistics) to contribute to a deeper u...

Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition is a comprehensive textbook that bridges the gap between the fields of sociolinguistics and second language acquisition, exploring the variety of ways in which social context influences the acquisition of a second language. It reviews basic principles of sociolinguistics, provides a unified account of the multiple theoretical approaches to social factors in second languages, summarizes the growing body of empirical research, includi...

Bilingual education is one of the fastest growing disciplines within applied linguistics. This book includes the work of 20 specialists working in various educational contexts across Europe, Latin America and North America to create a volume which is both comprehensive in scope and multidimensional in its coverage of current bilingual initiatives. The central themes of this volume, which draws on past experiences of bilingual education, include issues in language use in classrooms at eleme...

A study of first and second language development in an indigenous community with implications for broader linguistic and cognitive issues.When two or more languages are part of a child's world, we are presented with a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. In this book, Norbert Francis examines the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of competence that come together in making up its compo...

Some sixty years after the "Controversial Discussions" in the early 40s, this passionate book resurrects their spirit on a global scale. Under the aurthor's generous, tactful yet strong leadership, a small discussion group of noteworthy analysts of the International Psychoanalytical Association, coming from all the theoretical and geographical regions in today's psychoanalytic Babel, met several times over three years in order to deal, by way of the detailed discussion of their clinical ex...

In a field like L2 vocabulary teaching and learning where interest and research studies are burgeoning, this book offers a useful collection of papers that contains new ways of investigating vocabulary development, techniques for vocabulary teaching such as the Focus on Form hypothesis, word associations, and the use of concordance data. In addition, it tackles recent areas of analysis such as the treatment of vocabulary in teaching materials—an area of almost complete neglect in the liter...

In the first decade of life, children become bilingual in different language learning environments. Many children start learning two languages from birth (Bilingual First Language Acquisition). In early childhood hitherto monolingual children start hearing a second language through daycare or preschool (Early Second Language Acquisition). Yet other hitherto monolingual children in middle childhood may acquire a second language only after entering school (Second Language Acquisition). This ...

This book introduces research-based pedagogical practices for supporting and enhancing language development and use in school-based immersion and dual language programs in which a second, foreign, heritage, or indigenous language is used as the medium of subject-matter instruction. Using counterbalanced instruction as the volume’s pedagogical framework, the authors map out the specific pedagogical skill set and knowledge base that teachers in immersion and dual language classrooms need so ...

After Piaget proves that Jean Piaget's work is critical for understanding some of the most current proposals in the study of psychological development. It analyzes Piaget's legacy, moving beyond the harsh critiques that have circulated since he lost prominence. It also brings together new developments and research practices that have grown out of Jean Piaget's tradition, while providing a retrospective glance into the intellectual atmospheres of different periods at which the contributors ...