Discourse connectives (DCs) are multi-functional devices used to connect discourse segments and fulfill interpersonal levels of discourse. This study investigates the use of selected 80 DCs within 11 categories in the argumentative essays produced by L1 and L2 university students. The analysis is based on the International Corpus Network of Asian…

This article looks at France's Loi Toubon, which mandates the use of French in private companies, to illustrate how macro-level language planning reaches a dead end if it fails to consider local contexts and involve micro-level agents. The motivations, limitations and contradictions of France's language policy in relation to companies are…

In 2012, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) implemented a requirement that all aspiring Canadians who wish to take the citizenship test must have an adequate level of English- or French-language skills, defined as Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) 4. The CLB 4 language policy directly and, we argue, problematically links language abilities…

This case study examines one Honduran immigrant family's community of practice during home literacy events. Data include field notes and audio and video recordings from six weeks of in-home observations. Coding and discourse analysis are used to analyse talk-in-interaction in order to understand how the family engages in literacy events. Family…

This article critically examines the role of language as medium of instruction (MOI) in shaping students' self-perceptions, worldviews, and identities in a globalizing world. We draw on identity and social positioning theories and on Bourdieu's concepts of capital and symbolic struggle to frame our investigation. Using an analytical framework…

Thailand's Participation as a member of the ASEAN Community forces her government to accelerate improvement of her citizens' competency of the English language. The continuing wave by Thai governments to develop and modernize the quality of education has influenced Thai society. Within Thailand, English proficiency has been reported as being…

Most conversation analysis (CA) studies of the initiation-response-feedback (IRF; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) sequence have focused on teacher actions in the feedback move. In this article, I use CA to analyze student initiatives (Waring, 2011) within an IRF sequence in one excerpt from a Chinese as a foreign language class. The excerpt…

In foreign language education, the teaching of culture remains a hotly debated issue. What is culture? What is its relation to language? Which and whose culture should be taught? What role should the learners' culture play in the acquisition of knowledge of the target culture? How can we avoid essentializing cultures and teaching stereotypes? And…

This article analyses the styles of English produced by an adult migrant who started to speak the language later in life, and it approaches them from the perspective of quantitative style-shifting and discursive stylization. After defining style and the procedures needed to justify the term "L2," the study describes the focal informant's…

The widespread use of English has--for better or worse--shaped the social and communicative norms and practices of many people the world over, and the likelihood of this continuing for the foreseeable future raises questions concerning English ownership, linguistic imperialism, language attrition, and mutual intelligibility, to name a few. These…

Topic management by non-native speakers (NNSs) during informal conversations has received comparatively little attention from researchers, and receives surprisingly little attention in second language learning and teaching. This article reports on one of the topic management strategies employed by international students during informal, social…

The present study explores how scholars working in the field of applied linguistics, language policy and language education might best contest and negotiate the increasingly economics-driven language polices enacted at the institutional levels of schools and workplaces. The study focuses on Japan as an interesting case of incongruence between…

This pilot study aims to highlight a) differences in pragmatic function and distribution of discourse markers (DMs) in computer mediated and face to face (FtF) settings and b) any correlation of DM uses and language competence. The data have been collected by video-recording and analysing three speakers of Italian L2 (language level competence:…

This paper explores ways of including indigenous knowledge systems in the teaching of English First Additional Language (EFAL). The aim is to use a socially inclusive teaching strategy in such a manner that the imbalances that past oppressive regimes brought into the teaching and learning of a second language, EFAL in this case, is challenged and…

This comparative case study (based on observational, interview, and picture-sort data) examines how teachers and students talk about cultural, linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic difference in two elementary Spanish-English two-way immersion programs. In addition, I analyze how those discourses are associated with both contextual conditions and…