The field of heritage language (HL) education is a rapidly growing area of educational linguistics research and pedagogy. While considerable research has looked at identity in relation to HL learning in adolescents and adults, this article focuses on the identities and language attitudes of young HL learners of Arabic and Somali at an elementary…

Children experience physical phenomena and formulate an epistemological worldview before contact with school science. School science extends thought about the same phenomena to deeper levels but does not always link with out-of-school experiences. This study explored preservice teachers' indigenous knowledge or tacit knowledge about the playground…

Though definitions vary, the literature on heritage speakers of Spanish identifies two primary attributes: a linguistic and cultural connection to the language. This article profiles four Anglo college students who grew up in bilingual or Spanish-dominant communities in the Southwest who self-identified as Spanish heritage speakers, citing…

This qualitative study sought to prompt a critical and reflective discourse on the dismal use of mother tongue in Kenyan early childhood education (ECE) institutions in an attempt to detect existence of xenocentrism. Although the Kenyan ECE policy framework sanctions use of the language of the catchment area when teaching and communicating with…

This article draws on a qualitative study which seeks to explore whether Iranian English as a foreign language learners experience any reversal conceptual transfer and whether they construct two identities as a result of learning a foreign language. The findings from the open-ended questionnaires distributed among 65 undergraduates at the…

The influx of English borrowed items into Kuwait has recently considerably increased, driven by both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, mainly through new electronic media, and direct contact with the donor language. Kuwaitis, especially, the new generation heavily make use of English loanwords in mobile devices applications such as Twitter,…

Media consumption is commonly seen as a major way of appropriating languages and cultures. Availability and accessibility of material are essential conditions for developing plurilingual cultural practices. Transnational circulation of cultural goods has reached a particular intensity in today's world but is still marked by deep language…

The present paper reports a study on communicative anxiety of two groups of adult users. The paper aims at exploring the communicative anxiety of multilingual speakers and at analysing the communicative anxiety in second and third languages. This study includes 532 participants who were divided in two groups according their L1. One group of…

Noticing plays an important role for second language acquisition. Since the formulation of the output hypothesis (Swain, 1985), it has been proven that producing output can lead to noticing. Studies on noticing have revealed little focus on grammar, and an in-depth investigation of grammar noticing has not been conducted so far. Studies into…

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

A growing number of bilingual and multilingual national and international students are enrolling in graduate programs in the United States, creating an urgent need to understand how these writers build knowledge of unfamiliar academic genres and become part of their disciplinary academic communities (Selony, 2014). Such students struggle with…

Building on the research on translanguaging practices in classrooms (e.g. García, 2009; Sayer, 2011) and immigrant families' literacy practices (e.g. Gregory et al., 2004; Li, 2006), this qualitative study explores the nature of translanguaging practices of four Korean bilingual children and their families in home literacy events. Participant…

This study investigates the functions served by learners' first language (L1) in classroom interaction among Iranian learners of English (L2). The study aims to determine how learners' L1 serves them in their L2 learning. It adopts a qualitative approach. The study involved the participation of eleven Grade 9 learners in one Iranian high school in…

Looking at data from three siblings from a German/Polish family that immigrated to the United States in 1952, we discuss bilingual language development and the effect of teacher support in schools on language maintenance and shift. All three subjects report that they did not give up their heritage language but rather came back to it at different…

English as a medium of instruction and communication is becoming a central pedagogy in various countries in the world. In Pakistan, most of the advanced academic institutions use English as their medium of instruction, however students and teachers have been observed communicating in their first languages, especially Urdu, in the classrooms. This…