Overview
The linguistic knowledge and language use of high school adolescents is discussed as demonstrating a turning point in later, school-age language development, reflected by the ability to deploy a rich repertoire of the lexicon and grammatical constructions of speaker-writers’ first language in different types of discourse and varied communicative settings. To start, the key notions of “adolescence” and of “linguistic literacy” are defined, as background to a survey of research-based findings for text construction abilities in different genres, taking into account both local linguistic expression and global discourse organization. This is followed by consideration of the cognitive underpinnings of discourse construction, in the conviction that general socio-cognitive abilities both underlie and enhance linguistic knowledge and language use during the period in question and that they are crucial to developing literacy. This forms the basis for consideration of the thematic...
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Grateful thanks are extended to the editor of the encyclopedia for his constructive feedback and to Bracha Nir and Batia Seroussi for their valuable comments on an earlier version. The author alone is responsible for inadequacies that remain.
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Berman, R.A. (2017). Language Development and Literacy. In: Levesque, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_19-2
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