The present study investigated the dominant verb-phrase structure and the semantic functions of the modal "must" in research papers. It also determined whether the modal "must" conforms to or deviates from the standard modal usage in American English. A total of 122 graduate research papers were analyzed. The findings revealed…

The aim of this paper is to present and explain the long and bitter contestation between two poles over the orientation, the aims and the content of education as well as the form of the Greek language to be used in the school textbooks. During the last seventy years (1750-1821) of the Ottoman rule of Greece the poles were cultural but were…

Framed within the discussions of the knowledge base for language immersion teachers, this article presents a qualitative case study of a first-year Grade 2 French immersion teacher's enactment of his systemic functional linguistic (SFL) knowledge to position his students in a culturally sustaining genre pedagogy. We examined interactive events and…

This corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists…

Aboriginal English, the language many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students bring to the classroom, represents the introduction of significant change into the English language. It is the argument of this paper that the linguistic, social and cultural facts associated with the distinctiveness of Aboriginal English need to be taken into…

This paper reports on a promising methodology for multilingualism studies that was trialled at the National Institute of Education (NIE) on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2018. The methodology named the Aural-Oral Transect (AOT) is a systematic, easy-to-implement, unbiased way of collecting quantitative data on…

From intercultural experience, and following scholarly analysis, this article blows the whistle on the supposed advantages of the development of diverse "World Englishes." While native-speaker English is rooted in biblical faith, global Englishes may not represent either good theology, or good sense. The ongoing popularity of…

This paper investigates the conditions under which stakeholders in the higher education system in multilingual Switzerland link expectations of students' future economic to the development of human capital. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in a project focusing on mobile students crossing linguistic borders within Switzerland, I examine how…

This paper explores comparatively and historically why Nordic and Continental welfare and education regimes differ in the degree of comprehensiveness of their primary and lower secondary school systems. It analyses how school reforms, reform attempts and coalitions in the post-war decades were shaped by different cleavage structures in Norway and…

This paper introduces the term 'trans-scripting' to examine fleeting, socially unstable practices of writing a language in a non-canonical script. As a theoretical notion, trans-scripting conceives of script as a semiotic resource whose situated choice and sequential alternation can create discursive meaning. The case study is on 'Hellenized…

Although L2 reading is traditionally framed as an individual enterprise, digital annotation tools (DATs) have recently been developed allowing groups of readers to collaborate and provide mutual scaffolding through collective annotation of texts (Blyth, 2014; Thoms, Sung, & Poole, 2017). These tools reframe L2 reading as an interactive process…

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the role of family micro-Language Policies (LP's) in the context of the Moroccan Diaspora in urban and semi-urban areas in Spain by examining and contrasting different cases of language transmission within transnational migrant families of Moroccan origin. The paper answers the following questions: How are…

The present paper is a case study of how the commodification of the Russian language has transformed a market in New Delhi, India, inaugurated in 1969 and known as Yashwant Place. Over the years, the market slowly assumed a new identity, referred to as Yashka not only by Russian visitors but also tourists from countries of the former Soviet Union,…

The acquisition of a particular language and its standard norms of use have been traditionally channeled through education, dictionaries and institutional publications, but more and more, the internet has become a recurrent platform to consult norms and rules, through different forms of electronically mediated communication in which language users…

This article analyses how speakers of an autochthonous heritage language (AHL) make use of digital media, through the example of Low German, a regional language used by a decreasing number of speakers mainly in northern Germany. The focus of the analysis is on Web 2.0 and its interactive potential for individual speakers. The study therefore…