Suresh Canagarajah is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor and Director of the Migration Studies Project, Departments of Applied Linguistics and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA. Having a BA with a major in English from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, Professor…

Language-in-education research can contribute to transformative progress toward educational equity and excellence. Although this assertion is likely uncontroversial within the field of language in education, agreeing on which types of research lead to which transformative progress is much less straightforward. The thought-provoking commentaries on…

Within the spirit of conspiration, this article brings together contributions from participants of the PhD-led UCL Reading and React Group 'Colonialism(s), Neoliberalism(s) and Language Teaching and Learning', which ran in 2019/20. Weaving together various perspectives, the article centres on the dialogic nature of the decolonial enterprise and…

In this personal reflection, Sonia Nieto recounts the lessons she learned about language and literacy from learning to speak Spanish and then English; to reading and writing; and the impact of these lessons on her identity, teaching, research, and life; and, more broadly, on the fields of education and literacy.

While learning and teaching English as an additional language are lifelong learning processes for both learners and teachers, these two sectors are largely dominated by West-centric linguistic and cultural imperialism, epistemic hegemony, racism, and neoliberalism, which are tied to colonialism and imperialism. In light of this issue, I argue that…

There is no denying that English is an international language, and as such we must expect to encounter a multitude of local varieties: not only the national Englishes, such as American, British, Australian, etc. but also an even greater number of learner Englishes, such as French English, Brazilian English, Japanese English and the like. But the…

In this article, we take up and expand upon a number of issues of linguistic theory raised in Ursula Ritzau's recent article "Learner language and polylanguaging: how language students' ideologies relate to their written language use" published in the "Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism". The present critique is…

I am generally positive about Muysken's (M) approach, and the potential use of unifying various seemingly related phenomena is obvious. The approach could also serve as a tool in determining to what extent these phenomena actually are sides of the same coin (I am somewhat less convinced of this than most contact linguists).

In their keynote contribution, Poplack, Zentz & Dion (henceforth PZD; Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue) propose an interesting "scientific test of convergence" (under section heading: "Introduction") which contains criteria to check whether a particular feature in a given language in contact with another one is…

Monolingual speakers of a national language continue to be the ideal figures on which national identities and senses of community are built. Yet this longstanding equation between nation and language is being contested by other ideologies. Alternatives are emerging from such disparate social locations as the European Union, now advocating for…

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalan, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages,…

The worldwide spread of English has recently received much interest. Issues relating to the multifaceted roles of English around the world have been highlighted and purist positions about English challenged. In particular (a) the assumption that British English is the only valid standard of English; and (b) the notion that the "native speaker" is…

This article presents an adaptation of a position paper written by Da Pidgin Coup, a group of concerned faculty and students in the Department of Second Language Studies (SLS). In fall 1999, the group became concerned about a statement made by the chairman of the Board of Education implicating Pidgin in the poor results of the students of Hawai'i…

Cites examples of recent changes in language and suggests what forces are at work to produce language change. (DD)

Provides examples of ways in which the linguistic environment is constantly changing. (DD)