Arabic speaking countries live in diglossic communities. This is where two or more varieties of a language are used by the same speech community. This paper examines students' attitude towards Arabic language varieties. It focuses mainly on Egyptian students' attitude towards the fu??a on one hand and the Egyptian Arabic (EA) variety on the other.…

Social psychologists have suggested that language-based ideologies related to "stereotype threat" (i.e. variations in performance-based on ability perceptions of language groups) may affect students' academic achievement regardless of school language support. However, it is unclear whether efforts to support students' first language…

Media literacy education has become increasingly present in curricular initiatives around the world as media saturate our cultural environments. For second-language teachers and teacher educators whose practice centers on language, communication, and culture, the need to address media as a pedagogical site of critique is imperative. In this…

This study investigated degrees of mutual intelligibility among 3 structurally related languages in South Africa: Sepedi, Sesotho, and Setswana. To compare reading proficiency of mother-tongue speakers who enrolled for freshman courses at the University of Limpopo, 4 reading experimental conditions, in the 3 languages and 1 in a harmonized text,…

Communication is one of the keywords of the global age. The ever-increasing use of English as a World language has clearly meant that British RP and American Standard English (GA) are no longer seen as the models that learners aspire to. With the global spread of English, three major related questions come to our mind: (a) diversity and…