The Ancient Near East provides a particularly striking example for the dynamics of knowledge transfer throughout space and time. The civilizations that emerged here, at the dawn of history, attest to continuous processes of exchange, adaption, and negotiation, to the emergence of content and its reconfiguration, to diffusion, disappearance and resurgence of themes, concepts, topics and ideas. In the late fourth millennium the creation and implementation of supraregional notational systems in southern Mesopotamia triggers a cognitive revolution: within a few centuries the use of writing becomes a dominant cultural technique and over the subsequent millennia the technique of wedge-writing spreads throughout southwest Asia. Numerous indigenous cuneiform subcultures came into being in a wide variety of times and places, but these distinct instantiations were held together (and preserved the possibility of common legibility) through shared practices of teaching and learning, a common core of textual materials and, not least, a systematic instrumentarium for representing speech and notation. This repertoire is part of each of these streams of tradition, which characterise the cuneiform cultures as a whole. In light of the centuries of tradition, the great effort that has gone into its construction and maintenance as well as the preservation of original linguistic materials and their translation into more familiar languages, the validity of this scientific tradition, broadly conceived, cannot be disputed. Still, even if the historical processes of transmission within the cuneiform world and the difficulties of translating cuneiform sources into non-cuneiform traditions prevented a general and far-reaching mobilisation of the cuneiform sources as vehicles for scientific reflection, these same factors also ensured its continued survival in Mesopotamia and Syria for not centuries, but rather millennia. One of the most important components of this process was the awareness of practitioners about language, its role for and its impact on the generation of knowledge, and specifically about linguistic patterns. Among the literally innumerable textual artefacts from the ancient Near East, there are some that both explicitly and implicitly encode traces of this distinctively linguistic awareness. It was in pursuit of these traces of (meta)linguistic awareness that the participants in this volume came together.

Metalinguistic Awareness and Second Language Acquisition is the first book to present an in-depth overview of metalinguistic awareness as it relates to SLA. In this volume, Roehr-Brackin discusses metalinguistic awareness in the context of both child and adult language learning, and outlines the various methods that can be used to measure metalinguistic awareness. The author presents different approaches to metalinguistic awareness, including a cognitive-developmental perspective that explains how the concept relates to literacy, and an applied linguistics perspective that understands metalinguistic awareness as explicit or conscious knowledge about language. Roehr-Brackin explores the role of metalinguistic awareness in language education aimed at young learners, as well as in instructed adult SLA. This book is an excellent resource for those researching or taking courses in second language acquisition, bi- and multilingualism, and language teaching.

This book systematically examines how learning to read occurs in diverse languages, and in so doing, explores how literacy is learned in a second language by learners who have achieved at least basic reading skills in their first language. As a consequence of rapid globalization, such learners are a large and growing segment of the school population worldwide, and an increasing number of schools are challenged by learners from a wide variety of languages, and with distinct prior literacy experiences. To succeed academically these learners must develop second-language literacy skills, yet little is known about the ways in which they learn to read in their first languages, and even less about how the specific nature and level of their first-language literacy affects second-language reading development. This volume provides detailed descriptions of five typologically diverse languages and their writing systems, and offers comparisons of learning-to-read experiences in these languages. Specifically, it addresses the requisite competencies in learning to read in each of the languages, how language and writing system properties affect the way children learn to read, and the extent and ways in which literacy learning experience in one language can play a role in subsequent reading development in another. Both common and distinct aspects of literacy learning experiences across languages are identified, thus establishing a basis for determining which skills are available for transfer in second-language reading development. Learning to Read Across Languages is intended for researchers and advanced students in the areas of second-language learning, psycholinguistics, literacy, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic issues in language processing.

Originally published in 1995, this collection of papers introduced a new dimension to the understanding of reading by focusing on the relation between spoken and written language processing. New perspectives on speech and reading are introduced by highlighting aspects of the two linguistic skills that had received little attention in the past. The comparative perspective adopted in this collection presents an innovative focus on speech and the acquisition of alphabetic reading skill. Major new sources of evidence are discussed, like reading in nonconventional input modalities, braille reading, and speech processing in lip-reading. Contributors also discuss the reading process in non-alphabetic orthographies and the specifics of the reading acquisition problem in logographic or mixed writing systems (like Chinese and Japanese) and their relations to underlying speech representations. A central concern of all chapters is the role of phonological processes in different modalities and writings systems, and at different stages in the reading acquisition process. Drawing on expertise of the contributors, the book presents a novel and varied view of the achievements, the promises and the challenges facing the researcher once the intimate link between speech and reading comes to the foreground.

In the past fi fteen years there has been a growi ng interest in the development of children's awareness of language as an object in itself -- a phenomenon now generally referred to as metal inguistic awareness. Until the publication of an earlier volume in the Springer Series in Language and Communication, The Chitd's Conoeption oi Language, edited by A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, and W. J. M. Levelt, there had been no systematic treatment of metalinguistic awareness. The major goal of that volume was to map out the field of study by describing the phenomenon of interest and defining major theoretical issues. The aim of the present volume is to present an overview of metalinguistic awareness in children which reflects the current state of research and theory. The volume is divided into three major sections. The first considers various conceptual and methodological issues that have arisen from efforts to study metalinguistic awareness. It addresses such questions as what is metalinguistic awareness, when does it begin to emerge, and what tasks and procedures can be employed to assess its development in young children. The second sect ion cri ti ca 11y revi ews the research that has been conducted i nto the four general types of metalinguistic awareness -- phonologieal, word, syntactic, and pragmatic awareness. In the final section the development of metalinguistic awareness is examined in relation to general cognitive development, reading acquisition, bilingualism, and early childhood education.

This Element aims to address the complexity of metalinguistic awareness to achieve a thorough account of its impacts on second language (L2) reading development and promote an in-depth understanding of the factors regulating the influence of first language (L1) metalinguistic awareness on L2 reading. It is guided by four questions: 1) To what extent do L1 phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness correlate with L2 phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness in L2 readers? 2) To what extent do phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness correlate with word decoding intralingually in L2 readers? 3) To what extent do L1 phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness correlate with L2 word decoding in L2 readers? 4) To what extent do the relations in questions 1–3 vary as a function of linguistic-, learner-, measurement-, and instruction-related factors? This Element is the first to systematically investigate the roles of distinct facets of metalinguistic awareness in L2 reading.

This volume explores the defining element in the work of language teacher educators: language itself. The book is in two parts. The first part holds up to scrutiny concepts of language that underlie much practice in language teacher education yet too frequently remain under-examined. These include language as social institution, language as verbal practice, language as reflexive practice, language as school subject and language as medium of language learning. The chapters in the second part are written by language teacher educators working in a range of institutional contexts and on a variety of types of program including both long and short courses, both pre-service and in-service courses, and teacher education practice focusing variously on metalinguistic awareness for teachers, language improvement, and classroom communication. The unifying factor is that collectively they illuminate how language teacher educators research their practice and reflect on underlying principles.

Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors, this Handbook is a wide-ranging and invaluable reference guide to language teaching. A comprehensive reference work on language teaching, which combines the latest research findings, coverage of core topics, and examples of teaching experience from a variety of languages and settings Provides a unique breadth of coverage, including: the psycholinguistic underpinnings of language learning; social, political, and educational contexts; program design; materials writing and course design; teaching and testing; teacher education; and assessment and evaluation Offers a balanced evaluation of the major positions and approaches, including examining the increasingly important social and political context of language teaching Written by an international and interdisciplinary group of authors from a dozen different countries; English is only one of the many languages used as examples throughout the volume