In this paper we report on a longitudinal study of the linguistic development among Turkish-speaking children in Denmark. A series of data were collected from a group of children attending a public school in Køge during the period 1989-1998 and from the same group--now in their 20s--in 2006-2007. The data set has been analyzed from a number of…

This study had three main aims. First, we examined to what extent listening comprehension, vocabulary, grammatical skills and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) assessed prior to formal reading instruction explained individual differences in early reading comprehension levels. Second, we examined to what extent the three common component skills,…

When bilingual children enter formal reading education, host language proficiency becomes increasingly important. This study investigated the relation between socioeconomic status (SES), maternal language use, reading input, and vocabulary in a sample of 111 six-year-old children of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrant parents in the…

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal,…

Situated at the intersection of sociolinguistic and educational planes, English as a medium-of-instruction debate has always been at the crux of the intense debates, and offers a lens for a systematic investigation of the spread of English in Turkey. As Turkey is moving toward greater integration with the European Union and promoting its…

Pitch is often described metaphorically: for example, Farsi and Turkish speakers use a "thickness" metaphor (low sounds are "thick" and high sounds are "thin"), while German and English speakers use a height metaphor ("low", "high"). This study examines how child and adult speakers of Farsi,…

Little research has explored how preschools can support children's second-language (L2) vocabulary development. This study keenly followed the progress of twenty-six Turkish immigrant children growing up in Norway from preschool (age five) to fifth grade (age ten). Four different measures of preschool talk exposure (amount and diversity of…

This study analyzed whether secondary-school students' continuous and stationary anxieties predict their anxiety about writing and their attitudes about courses in Turkish. The research participants consisted of 281 students in Sakarya Province, 58% male and 42% female. The personal descriptive survey model was used for the research. As data…

Although a great majority of the L2 writing literature focuses on teaching English-language writing, scholars have begun to explore the teaching of writing in other second and foreign languages (FLs), including French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese. However, to our knowledge, no work exists exploring the exigencies of teaching…

Students from Turkish-speaking families are the largest minority language group in Germany. Yet, little is known about this group's literacy development. Using data from a 3-year longitudinal study, we examined whether the same base reading skills are involved in early reading comprehension of 100 Turkish-German bilingual and 69 German…

This contribution traces the development of an educational support program ("Förderunterricht") for immigrant children in the German Ruhr area, a region that has traditionally been strongly impacted by different waves of immigration. The program has grown out of what was originally a small-scale application of research results of a study…

This study describes the cross-cultural applicability of a multidimensional inventory of students' evaluation of critical thinking dispositions (California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory). The goal was to assess the cross-cultural psychometric equivalency of the CCTDI through testing measurement invariance across American and Turkish…

This study aims to investigate which factors are associated with Turkey's 15-year-olds' scoring above the OECD average (493) on the PISA'09 reading assessment. Collected from a total of 4,996 15-year-old students from Turkey, data were analyzed by logistic regression analysis in order to model the data of students who were split…

Grounded in the framework of second language socialization, this study explores the identity (re)construction of Erol, a Turkish doctoral student in the United States. Drawn from a larger corpus collected for a longitudinal, mixed-method research, the data for this study came from autobiographies, journal entries, and semistructured interviews.…

The purpose of this study was to adapt "Survey of Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge of Teaching and Technology" in order to assess pre-service primary teachers' Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) to Turkish. 407 pre-service primary teachers (227 female and 180 male) in their final semester in Education Faculties…