The aim of this article is to describe young children's beliefs about language and bilingualism as they are expressed in verbal utterances. The data is from Swedish-medium preschool units in three different sites in Finland. It was generated through ethnographic observations and recordings of the author's interactions with the children. The…

I examine whether teaching formulaic language raises English as a foreign language learners' awareness of pragmatic resources when expressing requests. To carry out this research I adopt a qualitative self-reflective approach which encourages students to use formulaic language when making requests. By responding to discourse completion tasks,…

This paper investigates the factors influencing the likelihood of choice of Gaelic-medium primary education in Scotland by means of the analysis of a national survey of public attitudes conducted in 2012. Binary logistic regression is used to investigate the association of five dimensions found in previous literature to be associated with the…

This study explores language use in Japanese-Catalan/Spanish families in Catalonia with a special attention to Japanese. In a community such as Catalonia wherein two languages of different status are in conflict within its own territory, the ability of families to maintain a socially "weaker" language and transmit yet another language…

The codeswitching pattern is different in rural Tanzania compared to urban agglomerations around the world. Even in very rural areas people in Tanzania are bilingual in Swahili, the national and local lingua franca, and their own first language. The result of this language contact is understudied and has only recently been focused on. This paper…

This study endeavoured to awaken mainstream teachers' awareness of language, specifically related to teaching emergent bilingual children who are learning English as an additional language (EAL) in the Republic of Ireland. Because EAL learners spend the majority of the day in the mainstream classroom, mainstream teachers' language awareness may…

Lexical profiling has yielded fruitful results for language description and pedagogy (Liu, 2014), and particularly highlighted the significance of academic vocabulary for EFL learners in this process. This investigation, likewise, attempts to comparatively profile the vocabulary, more particularly the academic vocabulary, in the…

It is commonly believed that intensive English programs (IEP) are designed to immerse learners in an English-speaking environment to help them effectively develop their language skills. Therefore, despite countless studies on the importance of a learner's first language (L1) in second language learning, some IEPs enforce English-only policies that…

Learner motivation is considered as one of the important factors that help to understand learner performance. As motivation is affected by both individual and social factors, it is essential to explore the learner motivation before effective instrumental programs for learners studying in different social contexts are designed and implemented.…

Ease of access, production, and distribution have made online technologies popular in language revitalization. By incorporating multimodal resources, audio, video, and games, they attract indigenous communities undergoing language shift in hopes of its reversal. However, by merely expanding language revitalization to the web, many language…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Scots, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers,…

In this article, we take up and expand upon a number of issues of linguistic theory raised in Ursula Ritzau's recent article "Learner language and polylanguaging: how language students' ideologies relate to their written language use" published in the "Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism". The present critique is…

This article examines some of the challenges that the notion of a (monolingual) native speaker faces in a global context of increasing awareness that bilingualism and multilingualism are the norm rather than the exception. It also discusses the distinction between two child language acquisition environments, bilingual first language acquisition…

Synonymy is important but difficult for language learners to grasp. Using a forced-choice question instrument, along with corpus data as reference, this study examines the use of four sets of synonyms by intermediate/advanced Chinese EFL/ESL learners and native English speakers. The data analyses reveal several key findings, including a general…

Much has been written on the determinants that can expedite or hinder learners' willingness to communicate in second and foreign language contexts. Though the literature is abundant with studies on many of these variables, little if any can be found to have targeted EFL students of private institutes in Iran. An effort was made in this study to…