International travel is still commonly touted as one of the most effective tools for language learning, yet it remains an elusive activity for those without a certain amount of economic or legal privilege. Although physical return to the home country is not always possible for refugees and their families--even one or more generation after…

The structure of the national educational system negatively affects the recognition of indigenous Mapuce people, who have been affected with regards to love, equal treatment and social esteem, as understood from the social justice approach of recognition described by Axel Honneth. This is evident in the indigenous knowledge and practices that have…

This article critically examines bilingual, intercultural education policies and practices in the context of the implementation of these policies in early childhood education. Specifically, it seeks to provide ethnographic background on the incorporation of Indigenous communities into preschools, through the participation of the Indigenous Culture…

Originating in the 1960's with the work of William Labov, the field of sociolinguistics has given way to a rich literature that continues to uncover the many ways in which social factors influence how we produce, perceive, and process speech. Sociolinguistic research has burgeoned alongside increasing globalization and migration, which has, in the…

This study examines the impact of explicit and implicit pronunciation instruction on the segmental pronunciation accuracy of phonemes /s/ and /z/ in an EFL classroom of 11th-grade Spanish-speaking students. The research focuses on transparent and non-transparent words containing the grapheme <s> and the phonemes /s/ and /z/ and was conducted…

The objective of this study was to validate a bilingual Spanish-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) considering its potential use as a discriminator between learners in terms of language competence. This version was designed based on the two forms available on one of the creators' websites as well as considering practices recommended…

Visually situated spoken words activate phonological, visual, and semantic representations guiding overt attention during visual exploration. We compared the activation of these representations in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) across four eye-tracking experiments, with a particular focus on visual (shape)…

Study 1: The present work examined the connection between language and conceptual development, investigating whether false-belief reasoning (FBR) and source-monitoring ability (SMA) abilities within the theory of mind (ToM) framework constrained the comprehension of semantic and pragmatic knowledge (evidential scalar implicatures) encoded in the…

This paper describes a study exploring in-service (IS) and pre-service (PS) teachers' language ideologies about non-Spanish-speaking students' multilingualism in Chilean classrooms. A survey was answered by 69 IS teachers and 34 PS teachers in the Chilean school system. Both groups were asked about two dimensions: (a) teachers' knowledge and…

Languages are not just sets of words. They are powerful tools essential to carry history, traditions, culture and wisdom. In Latin America, Mapudungun, the native language of Mapuche people -- the largest ethnic group in Chile -- can be threatened. A substantial linguistic shift has characterised the panorama of native languages of the current…

Developing second/foreign language (L2) comprehension skills can represent a challenging endeavor for learners with autism spectrum condition (ASC) because their social and verbal cognition may be impaired in terms of abstract reasoning, organizing, and retelling events, inferring intentions, and identifying emotions contained in a text. Thus, it…

This study determines (a) which factors of the parenting context, the child and their mothers are associated with environments that differ in their home literacy environment in a Chilean low-SES sample of 53-month-old children, and (b) whether reading comprehension at second and fourth grade is predicted by the socialization in the literacy…

This dissertation explores Spanish copular verbs, "ser" and "estar" (both 'to be' in English), in pre-adjectival contexts within two Spanish varieties: first-language (L1) Chilean speakers from Santiago (N = 29) and second-language (L2) English-speaking learners studying in Chile (N = 31). Bridging sociolinguistics and second…

Public education policies governing language revitalization and the teaching of indigenous languages have been in place for more than 20 years in Chile. In this journey, there has been considerable progress nationwide in the education of a generation of children in an intercultural socio-educational environment. However, there still exist…

This study explores how preschool educators could assess dual language learners' (DLLs) English language abilities using formative instruments in school settings. It specifically examines (1) DLLs' receptive and expressive language proficiencies measured using the instruments and (2) educators' perceived usefulness of them for informing…