Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, African American Language (AAL) remains stigmatized throughout the United States education system. There have been proposals to counteract this through curricula and/or ideological interventions targeted at teachers that seek to validate AAL while maintaining Dominant American English (DAE) as an…

Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools, yet since the early 2010s, these have enjoyed a marked resurgence in England's education policy as evident in discourses, funding, and pedagogical materials related to the so-called 'word gap.' This article conceptualizes the word gap…

This study is based on a broad research question: How does the translation into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) capture and convey the meanings embedded within languages belonging both inside and outside the sphere of the Arab world? To answer this question, a translation and literary study of borrowings, combining the methods of etymology and…

Language practices represent significant barriers to engagement in higher education for many learners from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. In Australia, such students may be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners, students from rural and remote locations, learners who are the first in their family to access higher education,…

Efficient language use involves the capacity to flexibly adjust to varied pronunciations of words. Although children can contend with some accent variability before their second birthday, it is currently unclear when and how this ability reaches its mature state. In a series of five experiments, we examine the developmental trajectory of toddlers'…

Purpose: This paper aims to outline the misguided underpinnings of the "word gap" concept promoted by Hart and Risley (1995). This concept posits that a "30 million word gap" between children of poverty and those from affluent households accounts for widespread academic disparities. Based on this premise, there has been a…

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United…

This study of vocabulary change investigates the regional vocabularies found in eight of the Southern states and seeks conclusions about the relative changes in uniformity in current local use. Assumptions, procedures, and techniques for research are presented here. The results reported were obtained from a printed vocabulary questionnaire…

Paper presented before the Indiana University Linguistics Club on May 13, 1971, in Bloomington, Indiana. (VM)

Study of Danish language needs of an immigrant student leads to the assertion that concepts pertaining to first- and second-language vocabulary need revision, particularly regarding certain minority languages and certain fields, including the distinction between "active" and "passive" vocabulary and first-language and…

Previous research on Spanish vocabulary for second language instruction has focused primarily on word frequency in a variety of print sources, and has the added disadvantages of being outdated and having too complex a format. A new, computer-based analysis of spoken Spanish from different dialect regions of the world was undertaken to provide more…

This guide is designed for the Arabic language training of Peace Corps volunteers serving in Tunisia and focuses on daily communication skills needed in that context. It contains 15 lessons, each made up of: a teacher's guide sheet, which outlines specific objectives, contents, and materials needed; a dialogue introducing the lesson's theme; a…

Essays on lexicon and vocabulary development, all in French, address these topics: bilingual lexicon in the context of translation; lexical and conceptual representation in bilinguals; pronouns in "existential" constructions in French and English; configurational functions within grammar; Gustaf Stern's diachronic semantic schema; the…