Much research on requests has been carried out among L1 Chinese adults, L1 Chinese children, L1 children, L2 adults, and L2 children, but no studies to date have simultaneously examined Chinese children's requests in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). The aim of this study is to investigate how Taiwanese elementary school children vary requests…

The present study investigates heritage learners' recognition of native-like and non-native-like mood selection in Spanish volitional constructions along two dimensions: age of onset of bilingualism in English (operationalized as age of arrival) and language use. Thirty-two heritage learners completed a grammaticality judgment (GJ) and an editing…

This commentary responds to the papers in the special issue "Accomplishing identity in bilingual interaction" and particularly to the use of Bucholtz and Hall's (2004a, 2004b, 2005) framework for the linguistic analysis of identities in interaction. The commentary focuses on the relationship between theory and empirical work, with attention to the…

Language is both a divisive and a unifying force in Brussels. Historically predominantly Dutch-speaking, surrounded by the officially Dutch-speaking federal state of Flanders, located in a majority Dutch-speaking nation-state, and with the majority of its Belgian citizens Francophone, Brussels has officially been bilingual Dutch-French since 1962.…

Previous research has shown that during syntactic priming activities, L1 speakers produce more target structures when they are prompted by a lexical item that occurred in their interlocutor's previous utterance. This preliminary study investigated whether L2 speakers are similarly influenced by lexical items during syntactic priming activities.…

In this article, the author analyzes the policies that since the early 1990s have actively promoted the status of Spanish both as an international and global language. The focus is on the actions and discourses of Spain's primary language policy agencies, namely, the Cervantes Institute and the Spanish Royal Academy. Although the Institute has…

In this paper we investigate multilingualism as a phenomenon which pervades different social and cultural levels but is manifested in the everyday life of multilingual individuals. As an illustration, we examine multilingualism from the perspective of a young Sami boy, Ante, and explore how different languages function as a complex--but at times…

The use of social vs. cognitive approaches to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) has engendered considerable debate in the field. For instance, the recent "Modern Language Journal" Focus Issue (Lafford, 2007a) reviewed the ongoing debate between scholars espousing socially- and cognitively-grounded approaches to SLA research and…

This article poses the question of how educators can put into practice the valorization of the vernacular and its use as a pedagogical resource. It provides a critical sociolinguistic orientation toward the use of Spanglish in schools. It gives a short descriptive overview of the linguistic features of Spanglish and responds to some of the…

When considering the extent to which plurilingualism nowadays shapes "every facet of human life" (Aronin & Singleton, 2008, p. 8), especially within European member states, one understands the reason why individual plurilingualism has become a benchmark in education, raising concerns in improving the quality of communication among…

Knowing a foreign language is of crucial importance in ensuring the effectiveness of an education abroad. Essentially, the practice of teaching and mastering a foreign language serves as a means of intercultural communication, a conduit of interaction in a new sociocultural environment, and a mediator through which to assimilate new norms and…

The study investigates whether the informal interactive written discourse in instant messaging (IM) is permeating the more formal writing of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) college students, and how students' identities are constructed in terms of English multiliteracies in Taiwan. The study is designed as a qualitative case study. The…

This paper reports on my first-hand experiences of being a "purist" in Hong Kong, during which time I was not allowed to use mixed code, a common discursive practice among Hongkongers in Hong Kong. I shall discuss the difficulties in using "pure" English and "pure" Chinese in my daily life, as well as exploring the…

A major challenge for the increasing multicultural and multilingual community college student population has been the difficulty in accessing the register features which define academic writing. In this study, an analysis of clause structures using writing samples collected from 45 community-college students, 15 from African-American, Haitian and…

Research in both the anthropology and sociology of education has increasingly come to consider the institutional effects of migration, globalization, and transnationalism on learning environments. Yet, most studies examining transmigration and education have only looked at migrant children in schools rather than at the "transitions" they…