Responding to a recent call for interdisciplinary research into 'night studies', the present study attempts to put the nighttime at the centre of the sociolinguistic enquiry, seeking to explore how the nocturnal linguistic landscape (LL) differs from the diurnal LL by drawing on Singapore's Chinatown as the research site. A total of 1091 LL items…

Over the past two decades, the Chinese language has emerged as a global language. Gulf Cooperation Council countries, such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, have integrated Chinese language into their educational systems and established Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese language and culture. In Qatar, interest in…

Characterised by media saturation and hypermobility, contemporary society has presented polymedia as an integral element of family life. The expansion and recognition of polymedia in language learning calls for exploring its role in heritage language (HL) maintenance. However, despite growing research interest in polymedia in diverse realms, there…

Due to modernisation and Englishisation in Bahrain, noticeably different types of bilingual and bicultural experiences exist, especially among the youth. Recently, the rise of Chinese education policies in the region raises the question of how it might alter the local linguistic market and the forms of capital within it. Applying a…

Recent linguistic landscape (LL) research has witnessed a change in focus to untypical, peripheral and fluid signs. Compared to typical (or permanent, fixed, etc.) signs which tend to be subject to strong policy intervention, language use on untypical signs is often more autonomous, thus could better reflect the "de facto" language…

A growing number of international doctoral students choose to study in China, a non-traditional learning destination. However, relatively few studies have investigated these students' academic writing practices while undertaking their studies in China. This study draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, and capital, and the notion of…

A region's identity is closely related to its semiotic landscape as well as history, economy and culture. This article explores the linguistic landscape of Jianghan Road, a historical business centre in Wuhan, P. R. China, by photographing and analysing 1308 official and unofficial signs in order to provide a snapshot of language choice and…

In the field of educational sociolinguistics there is a body of literature with a focus on children in complementary schooling. While timely, such work often does not often pay much attention to the parents who frequent the school setting, preferring to focus on the interactions between children. This paper addresses this absence by reporting on a…

This study aims to explore how ethnic identity, linguistic ideology, and family capital work in interaction in shaping Korean-Chinese migrant families' multilingual planning against the backdrop of China's rapid urbanisation and internal migration. A model of investment (Darvin and Norton [2015]. "Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied…

This study explored the family language policy, bilingual parenting profiles, and the predictors among Chinese parents in Singapore. Altogether 175 parents of Chinese-English bilingual preschoolers (aged 2;6-5;6) were sampled and surveyed. The research results indicated that: (1) a majority of the parents (93.7%) believed in early bilingualism but…

A growing body of research has provided evidence for the foreign language effect on thinking, notably decision-making. Our prior work found reduction of recency effect following positive feedback in a foreign language as compared to the native tongue during even-probability gambling. However, the fundamental mechanisms underlying this effect…

Although there is a body of research on the teacher first language (L1) use in English-medium-instruction (EMI) classrooms, very little research has probed into how international students perceive local teacher L1 use and their learning practices in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) context. To address the gap, the present case study explored a…

This article presents the results of a small-scale study on the linguistic landscape in the two terminals of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Thirty-one digital photos of non-identical signs out of a total of 368 'top-down' signs identified in the public space were collected, and questionnaires were administered to airport users to gauge…

This article examines linguaculturally diverse university students' affective translingual practices of using emojis and languages in computer-mediated communication. Research studies have investigated the sociopragmatic uses of emojis from the perspectives of social semiotics, language socialisation, and translingual practices. This study expands…

Although recent years have witnessed increasing interest in learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) in China and around the world, there seems to be a paucity of research into the medium of instruction in the CFL classroom. This paper describes a study of the practice of MoI choice in the CFL classroom, situated within the framework of…