With the frequent interaction between China and the world, glocalisation, the combination of globalisation and localisation, is an unavoidable trend. This paper argues that the association of local situation with global awareness is one of the ways to assimilate English for daily use in Chinese context. The fundamental idea is that the use of…

For the past three decades, momentum has gathered in favour of a multilingual turn in second language acquisition research and teaching. "Multicompetence" has been proposed to replace "nativeness" and "monolingualism" to measure L2 learners' success. This proposed shift has not made its way into L2 teaching settings.…

Background: In South Africa, and in many other African countries, official language-in-education policy supports the use of learners' primary language(s) in early schooling. In reality, texts in the language(s) of the former colonial power are dominant, with high-interest texts in languages familiar to young learners in short supply or…

In the past decades, interests in L2 (English as a second language) students' language socialization in academic communities have increasingly grown since more and more L2 students have enrolled in universities in the Western world. Previous studies centered on L2 students' attempts to obtain academic discourses as well as linguistic and cultural…

The chapters in this volume, all written by experts in the field, present an array of new research on second language acquisition (SLA) that touches on several current theoretical debates in the field and present a rich range of new empirical data and a number of innovative findings. The studies address questions relating to ultimate attainment,…

There is difficulty in defining the profile of a Heritage Language Learner (HLL) due to the experiences with language that individuals face in their social and academic world. There are questions centered on whether a categorical distinction between the native speaker and the native user can be upheld; this is inherently problematic when there is…

Eight children aged 4;1-8;1 and their primary caregivers participated in a study designed to evaluate their use of the onset cluster /str-/ in both read and conversational speech. The cluster is currently undergoing a reported sound change in many varieties of English, with the initial /s/ being retracted to [?]. The study compared the initial…

This dissertation explores the main question, "What are the issues involved in the definition and translation of color terms in dictionaries?" To answer this question, I examined color term definitions in monolingual dictionaries of French and English, and color term translations in bilingual dictionaries of French paired with nine…

Investigations of the validity of a number of high-stakes language assessments are conducted using an argument-based approach, which requires evidence for inferences that are critical to score interpretation (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008b; Kane, 2013). The current study investigates the extrapolation inference for a high-stakes test of…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

Patterns of transmigration emerging as a consequence of globalization are creating new and complex markets for communicative resources in which languages and language varieties are differently valued. In a Swedish context, where lingua franca English can facilitate communication but where monolingual norms prevail and Swedish is positioned as the…

Research on Arabic as a foreign language has centered on studying students' attitudes toward the problems of learning Arabic as a foreign/second language. Because little is currently known about language use within the Arabic classrooms, this study aimed to investigate how students perceive the use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and colloquial…

In this article, the authors (re)think writing as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for writing research and teaching. Situated in posthumanist scholarship on intra-activity, trans-corporeality, and translingual assemblages, they provide data-theory encounters that resist the privileging of alphabetic…

The study employs a case study approach to examine the impact of educational backgrounds on nine Hong Kong tertiary students' English and Cantonese language practices and identifications as native speakers of English and Cantonese. The study employed both survey and interview data to probe the participants' English and Cantonese language use at…

In this piece I explore the concept of 'growth' in English teaching. Starting with John Dixon's 'growth' model, I argue that, by re-imagining his ideas in current contexts, practitioners might re-focus and re-invigorate the priorities of English teaching. Dominant conceptions of 'growth' are explored, along with their influence on teacher working…