The rhetoric of the reading wars has become more than just an armchair academic debate, but is encoded now in the very laws, house and senate bills, and legislative policies of the majority of the states. In turn, these policies are powered by staggering sums of money such as the 90-million-dollar investment of Fulton County, Georgia in a revamp…

Modern graduates face major challenges in the international job market where knowledge of English and other foreign languages became one of the most important requirements of a well-trained professional. Even though the demands of such candidates increase, the methodology of teaching English remains the same. Modern educators and students demand…

Due to the spread of the English language in various domains and the fact that English is used as a global language, researchers and educators have started to rethink the models and aims of English language teaching in different settings. From the World Englishes (WE) perspective, this study investigated the attitudes of Chinese university…

This paper sets out to peruse the role of various theories or more precisely, hypotheses invoked in second language acquisition (SLA) research by surveying three empirical studies pertaining to the critical period hypothesis in the SLA of phonetics and phonology. In particular, the three studies reviewed are titled in chronological order as (1)…

This commentary discusses the recent keynote article by Westergaard (2021), which is an interesting contribution to the field of language acquisition and multilingualism, especially because it attempts to provide a wider perspective by embracing first, second and third language acquisition. I address major claims put forward by Westergaard, to…

Globally many minority and Indigenous communities are searching for ways to reclaim languages that have been marginalized by socioeconomic and political processes. These efforts often involve novel literacy practices. In this article, we draw from ethnographic data in Mexico and Nepal to ask, what are the opportunities and constraints of teaching…

Research Findings: The current study examined the use of a newly developed instrument for measuring parental literacy beliefs in a highly diverse urban Dutch sample of 35 parents, participating in a family literacy program. The instrument was used to explore a new conceptualization of parental literacy beliefs and associations between beliefs and…

This article investigates the multilingual experiences of three Norwegian and Spanish-speaking adolescents with transnational backgrounds. Drawing on narrative analysis and positioning theory, the article seeks to understand how the adolescents position themselves in relation to different expectations of linguistic competence, identities, and…

This study investigates university students' perceptions of two different cases of foreign language courses conducted in L1&L2 and in only L2. This qualitative study was conducted as a multiple case study. The data were obtained via a a semi structured form and analysed through content analysis. The study mainly revealed the students had…

Translanguaging has been placed at the center of the research and teaching activity over the last decade, while teachers seem to promote the use of all the linguistic resources of their students in classrooms with linguistic and cultural diversity. Among the best practices for promoting translanguaging and the flexible use of the students'…

We suggest that while Indigenous languages are threatened by capitalist and neoliberal encroachments, responses from applied linguists in the academy can be misguided. To make our argument, we must first define neoliberalism, and examine how the broader neoliberal discourses of choice, competition and the free market have percolated and distilled…

Recent research suggests that psychotypology may be one of the main factors determining L3 acquisition and use, especially so in the early stages. However, the existence and nature of multilingual learners' perception of language proximity have often only been assumed rather than measured, and rarely addressed with respect to the increasingly…

This study reviews the difficulties that learners of English as a second or foreign language encounter in the use of English articles and puts forward some suggestions that can help advanced learners overcome their problems. It has been observed that learner performance may be deceptive and accurate article selections may be led by inappropriate…

This article reports on a study that combined two strands of research: studies of incidental vocabulary learning and studies of the classroom lexical environment (in which vocabulary exposure is measured and the potential for learning estimated). The study looked at the orthographic lexical environment in a language classroom over a semester and…

The research explores forms and function of variant tag questions (VTQs) in the native and non-native Englishes. For the said purpose, patterns of VTQs in Pakistani English are compared with two native (British and New Zealand) and two non-native (Indian and Singaporean) varieties. The components of the "International Corpus of English,"…