The well-known sampling limitation of most longitudinal corpus data can be even more consequential in the study of morphosyntactic variation in child language. An analysis of caregiver input suggests that variable use in overlapping contexts may be hard to find by solely relying on corpus data collected under the sampling procedures that are…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

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…

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…

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…

Exploring the Yiddish language of my father, grandmother, her grandmother, and beyond, this autobiographical article frames language as an ever-changing space where identities are negotiated, formed, and contested. Placing the history of Yiddish alongside my own familial relationship to the language, I explore how the stories of individual lives…

The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue.…

Translanguaging has now become central to a sociolinguistics that foregrounds globalization and mobility as key concepts for grasping human beings' capacity to engage with and draw on both multiple linguistic -- including named languages -- and semiotic resources dynamically and in combination for the purpose of meaning-making (García, Ofelia…

It is sometimes claimed that teaching grammar is elitist. This article contends that in actual fact, far from being elitist, grammar is a vital ingredient in the English language teaching mix. Since the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics there has been a school of thought in the English speaking world that the formal teaching of grammar is…

In this response to commentators, I agree with those who suggested that the distinction between exemplar- and abstraction-based accounts is something of a false dichotomy and therefore move to an abstractions-made-of-exemplars account under which (a) we store all the exemplars that we hear (subject to attention, decay, interference, etc.) but (b)…

The articles in this special issue contribute to understanding the interactional grounding of language learning by scrutinizing how patterns of language use emerge and get routinized as dynamic resources for accomplishing actions in co-constructed interaction. Their findings problematize how grammar is represented in second language (L2) teaching…

This article reflects on the epistemological steamrolling that the 2021 Ofsted Curriculum Research Review (OCRR) accomplishes: in part, by the positioning of the problem and solution through highly selective cherry-picking (omitting key causal factors); in part, through the discursive move of acknowledging complexity before offering simple and…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

Women and people of colour are underrepresented in physics in many parts of the world, to the detriment of the field. How do academics' beliefs about the role of 'brilliance' in career success contribute to these representation gaps, and what can be done to address them?

Humans are sensitive to the properties of individual items, and exemplar models are useful for capturing this sensitivity. I am a proponent of an extension of exemplar-based architectures that I briefly describe. However, exemplar models are very shallow architectures in which it is necessary to stipulate a set of primitive elements that make up…