There is a long-standing gap in literacy achievement between African American and European American students (e.g., NAEP, 2019, 2022). A large body of research has examined different factors that continue to reinforce performance differences across students. One variable that has been a long-term interest to sociolinguists and applied scientists…

Word Analysis is an approach to teach second language (L2) students about cultural perspectives which are understood collectively as the ideas, values, beliefs, and experiences many native speakers have regarding cultural domains within their own cultures. Word Analysis is anchored on the relationships between language and communication, and…

This article examines language classrooms as communicative settings for learners' development of sociolinguistic competence involving target language variation in a study abroad context. Specifically, it investigates how two Spanish teachers in Peru imparted knowledge of the social and contextual appropriateness of local linguistic variants that…

Perception of second language (L2) speakers and their speech is known to be influenced both by phonetic and by sociolinguistic factors. The existing body of scholarly research on L2 speech perception, however, is overwhelmingly focused on Indo-European languages, raising doubts about the generalizability of existing sociolinguistic, phonetic,…

Sociolinguistic variation (SLV) entails that language is affected by social context (i.e. register, pragmatics). Interest in the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in a second language (L2-SLV), as a key component of communicative competence, has grown exponentially over the past thirty years (Geeslin & Long, 2014). Researchers have…

'Translanguaging' has become the most popular term in discussions about how to use learners' languages as resources for target language teaching/learning, but it has also become ambiguous because it is being developed in proposals adopting different perspectives on multilingualism. The first aim of this article is to offer an overview of the two…

The Welsh Government's Welsh language strategy, Cymraeg: A million Welsh speakers [Welsh Government. 2017a. "Cymraeg 2050: A Million Welsh Speakers." Cardiff: Welsh Government], aims to increase the numbers of Welsh speakers to one million by 2050. The creation of new Welsh speakers and immersion education form an integral part of the…

Research on the acoustic characteristics of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) in North American English indicates that it is generally higher-pitched than Adult Directed Speech (ADS) and has unique prosodic characteristics, which is commonly found across many spoken languages. However, very little research has addressed another important aspect of…

This research investigated how a Critical Sociocultural Linguistics Literacy (CriSoLL) approach to authentic materials supports student literacy in a mixed Spanish heritage language (SHL) and additional language (L2) Spanish intermediate course at the university level. Using a qualitative approach (Cho, 2018; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021)…

This mixed-methods study aims to examine the mediating role of attitude toward English varieties in the relationship between Informal Digital Learning of English (IDLE) and perceptions of using English as an International Language (EIL) materials in pre-service English teachers. We collected and analyzed survey data from 434 Indonesian EFL…

Language legislation, given its importance in language rights, has received increasing attention over the past decades. This study offers a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the literature on language legislation from 2005 to 2023. By utilizing VOSViewer and CiteSpace, we have visualized and analyzed the scientific outputs, intellectual…

In this study, we examined interaction behaviors between a small number of participants in two massive open online courses (MOOCs) and an FAQ chatbot, focusing on the participants' native language markers. We used a binary native language marker (non-native English user vs. native English user) to distinguish between two groups in this multiple…

Although it has been established that U.S. students typically enter college unprepared to engage in interreligious conversations, it is unclear whether and to what extent a university course focused on the sociolinguistics of religion equips students to feel better prepared for such conversations. Therefore, this study employs an exploratory case…

In a Dialogue section of the "Journal of Sociolinguistics" (vol. 26, no. 1), author pairs introduce a number of themes and debates in sign language sociolinguistics, explore why these are debates; how the debates are situated within sociolinguistics as a whole; and how spoken language sociolinguistics does or does not have similar…

The back and forth migration of children and youth between the United States and Mexico has created a unique group of approximately nine million "students we share" who have been educated in both countries (Jensen and Sawyer 2013). The social, political, and economic interconnectivity of the United States and Mexico suggests that these…