Commercial advertisements in Arabic-speaking regions tend to alternate between dialectal Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, but it is not yet clear whether language variety has any impact on listener's lexical recall. Insight into this issue should help enterprises design their commercial advertisements in a linguistically intelligent manner. This…

Assessing a child's language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months…

This article highlights research collected during a year-long critical participatory ethnographic study at a primary school in Trinidad and Tobago. The study presents the experiences of two teacher collaborators who engage in the processes of problem identification, design and implementation of a language-friendly plan, reflective practice and…

Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative…

The concept of the "native speaker" (NS) remains a constant interest in the field of language pedagogy due to the need the field has for models, goals and norms (Davies, 2003, p. 1). On the other hand, some other researchers such as Byram (1997) in his model of intercultural competence (ICC) and Cook (2012) in his model of…

The present study examines whether bilectal Greek Cypriot educators are able to identify dialectal (Cypriot Greek) elements superimposed on the standard language (Standard Modern Greek) in a written variety-judgment task. By doing so, (meta)linguistic skills of bilectal teachers from Cyprus were put to the test and later compared to the results of…

Radio is one of the most affordable educational technologies available for the use in education and development in developing countries. This article explores the use of school radio broadcast to assist teachers and pupils to learn and improve English language both written and spoken in Kenyan primary schools. English language occupies a central…

It is widely believed that listeners understand some dialects more easily than others, although there is very little research that has rigorously measured the effects. This study investigated whether listeners experience more difficulty with regional, ethnic, and international dialects of English than with Standard American English. The results…

LANGUAGE PATTERNS OF BALTIMORE FIFTH-GRADERS FROM FOUR DISADVANTAGED, INNER-CITY ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS--TWO WHITE AND TWO NEGRO--AND FROM ONE WHITE MIDDLE-CLASS SUBURBAN SCHOOL WERE EXAMINED (1) TO IDENTIFY SUBGROUPS WHOSE LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR DIFFERS SYSTEMATICALLY FROM EACH OTHER AND FROM STANDARD ENGLISH, (2) TO GATHER INFORMATION ON THE LANGUAGE…

The paper discusses some issues that language variation creates for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction, identifies research strands relevant to program development, and describes two dialect program exemplars. It also suggests considerations for educational policy formation with respect to dialects. The introductory section gives…

The urban, ethnically Hawaiian child typically experiences great difficulty in learning to read English. In order to determine whether phonological confusion is a source of dialectical interference, the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) Phone Discrimination Test (KPDT) was developed for the one hundred twelve students in the KEEP school…

This is a report of the results of an investigation of a test of plurality and past tense in standard English (SE). This research replicated Gleason's 1957-58 study in Boston. The subjects were 27 speakers of Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) in a kindergarten class in Honolulu. The results showed that the children produced very few SE plural and past…

The collection contains 142 selected papers printed in the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Newsletter over the period 1966-1983. The papers are presented in 14 sections: the state of the art of English-as-a- Second-Language teaching; the relationship of language and culture; teaching standard English as a second dialect;…

This report presents a summary of the linguistic research conducted at the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) during its first five years of operation, as well as a description of relevant linguistic theories. The subjects of the research are the students in the KEEP elementary school (K-3) who were tested twice a year during the five-year…