This book explores the experiences of Indigenous children and young adults around the world as they navigate the formal education system and wider society. Profiling a range of different communities and sociolinguistic contexts, this book examines the language ecologies of their local communities, schools and wider society and the approaches taken by these communities to maintain children’s home languages. The authors examine such complex themes as curriculum, translanguaging, contact languages and language use as cultural practice. In doing so, this edited collection acts as a first step towards developing solutions which address the complexity of the issues facing these children and young people. It will appeal to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and community development, as well as language professionals including teachers, curriculum developers, language planners and educators.

This fascinating exploration of children's inquiry -- what it is, how it develops, and how it contributes to children's learning -- will help teacher educators and elementary teachers to understand, appreciate, and foster children's inquiry in classrooms. In this volume. Lindfors introduces a theoretical framework for understanding children's inquiry language -- not as linguistic forms (questions), but as communication acts in which the child brings another into the act of sense-making.

Accurately differentiate between errors that are related to second-language influence or are due to a communication disorder. Is your student having difficulty because they have an impairment or because they are learning a second language? Improve instructional targets for culturally and linguistically diverse students in the general education classroom as well as make gains and improve referrals for special education. The framework used in this book makes it easy for any education professional to distinguish between language differences and language disorders regardless of your own language background.

This book investigates the effects of foreign language anxiety (FLA) on young language learners, using as a basis for observation the early childhood English education industry in South Korea that has arisen as a result of English fever. The authors combine existing knowledge on the topic of FLA together with original research on FLA in young language learners to fill a large gap in knowledge with regards to this understudied and distinct group of learners. The book includes suggestions for alleviating FLA and encouraging foreign language enjoyment, which can be implemented by parents, teachers and policymakers and which will ultimately facilitate more effective language learning and support children’s psychosocial wellbeing.

Julia Gillen introduces the key theories of language acquisition and provides a historical overview of the subject. She looks at all the ways children learn to communicate, from writing and talking to playing and using computers.

Language, Children and Society: The Effect of Social Factors on Children Learning to Communicate investigates the processes involved in the development of communicative skills in young children, in particular as these unfold during the child's participation in social interactions in a variety of everyday, educational situations. For a fuller understanding of these processes, through which the child learns the vast array of communicative skills necessary to function effectively in social contexts, the broad range of situations in which the communicative exchanges are embedded—school, home, community, etc.—are examined. Comprised of 17 chapters, this volume begins by painting a vivid picture of human discrimination and prejudice that touches every child involved in the education process in the United States, a result that can be linked to language ignorance. The discussion then turns to some of the contributions of linguistics to education and some of the problems involved in reaching greater cooperation between linguists and educators. The relevance of developments in sociolinguistics to the study of language learning and early education is emphasized. Subsequent chapters focus on the communicative competence of kindergarten children; children's situational variation and situational competence; sex differences in the language of children and parents; and dialogue, monologue, and egocentric speech by children in nursery schools. This book will be of interest to teachers and students, as well as to practitioners in the fields of educational psychology, psychobiology, psychiatry, linguistics, and childhood education.

This volume introduces the field of child language development studies, and presents hypotheses in an accessible, largely non-technical language, aiming to demonstrate the relationship between these hypotheses and interpretations of data. It makes the assumption that having a theory of language development is as important as having reliable data about what children say and understand, and it advocates a combination of both `rationalist' and more 'empiricist' traditions. In fact, the author overtly argues that different traditions provide different pieces of the picture, and that taking any single approach is unlikely to lead to productive understanding. Susan Foster-Cohen explores a range of issues, including the nature of prelinguistic communication and its possible relationship to linguistic development; early stages of language development and how they can be viewed in the light of later developments; the nature and role of children's experience with the language(s) around them; variations in language development due to both pathological and non-pathological differences between children, and (in the latter case) between the languages they learn; later oral language development; and literacy. The approach is distinctly psycholinguistic and linguistic rather than sociolinguistic, although there is significant treatment of issues which intersect with more sociolinguistic concerns (e.g. literacy, language play, and bilingualism). There are exercises and discussion questions throughout, designed to reinforce the ideas being presented, as well as to offer the student the opportunity to think beyond the text to ideas at the cutting edge of research. The accessible presentation of key issues will appeal to the intended undergraduate readership, and will be of interest to those taking courses in language development, linguistics, developmental psychology, educational linguistics, and speech pathology. The book will also serve as a useful introduction to students wishing to pursue post-graduate courses which deal with child language development.