Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants' (ITAs') proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative…

This paper discusses symbolic violence in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. It revisits an archived recording of a group discussion between four boys about their chances of having sex with a female researcher. The data is rife with symbolic violence. Most obviously, the conversation enacted a heterosexist form of symbolic violence. This…

ELF cross-cultural interactions and mediation processes in specialized migration settings are often characterized by 'gatekeeping' asymmetries between the participants involved challenging a successful meaning negotiation (Guido, 2008). The exploration of migration encounters (Sperti, 2017) is particularly useful in the analysis of naturally…

The recorded text test (RTT) is commonly used to test dialect intelligibility, often to inform language development decisions. More than 25 papers using the RTT method were published on www.sil.org/silesr from January 2009 to March 2013. As introduced by Casad [1974. "Dialect Intelligibility Testing." Summer Institute of Linguistics…

The transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an…

This qualitative ethnographic Linguistic Landscape (LL) study collected and analyzed ten individual "walking tour" interviews with residents of Memphis, Tennessee, exploring the personal thoughts and feelings about linguistic changes in the communities triggered by the LL. The researcher focused the participants' attention on…