This paper draws draw on conceptualisations of language as heteroglossic to examine whether and how multilingual practices and plurilingual pedagogies are enacted as instructional strategies in two multilingual English-medium universities in western Canada. Multilingual educational contexts have the potential to comprise 'translanguaging spaces'…

Within the discourse of language planning and policy, there is an increasing realisation of the strategic role of information and communication technologies in the promotion of indigenous African languages. The article discusses the strategic role that social software, in particular blogs and wiki, can and should play in the development of African…

Purpose: This paper introduces Stroud's 'Linguistic Citizenship', a concept committed to democratic participation, to voice, to the heterogeneity of linguistic resources and to the political value of sociolinguistic understanding. Approach: It first outlines Linguistic Citizenship's links with the ethnographic sociolinguistics inspired by Hymes,…

We investigate the perceptions of international and American Chinese bilingual pre- and in-service graduate students and language teachers regarding Chinese varieties. The 25 participants were currently enrolled college students or recent graduates majoring in language education or other associated programmes at an urban university in the…

In line with what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) describe as a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences and given the growing interest in cosmopolitanism as a result of neoliberalism (Bernstein et al., 2015) and the global rise in the use of English (Seargeant, 2012), this article investigates the ideology of cosmopolitanism by drawing on the…

This article explores the links between multilingualism, the personality trait Tolerance of Ambiguity (TA), and attitudes toward linguistic variation among 379 mono-, bi-, and multilingual adults who completed an online questionnaire. A self-reported high level of proficiency in multiple languages, short- and long-term residence abroad, and high…

This study aims at examining Thainess as a writing strategy used in non-literary texts written by non-professional bilingual writers. These writers are advanced language learners who are pursuing their Master's degree in English. Seven English narratives of their language learning experiences were analyzed based on Kachruvian's framework of…

The meaning of some phrasal verbs can be guessed from the meanings of the parts (to sit down = sit + down, run after = run + after) and the meaning of some others have to be learned (to put up (a visitor) = accommodate, to hold up = cause delay or try to rob someone) due to their syntactic and semantic complexities. In this regard, the syntactic…

In this position paper, the author argues for the re-conceptualization of English language teaching (ELT) through the socio-cultural and context-based approach (SCA). For a typical English as a foreign language (EFL) situation, SCA takes as a point of departure a thorough understanding of the macro-level components e.g., local classroom…

This study explores wh-in-situ in CamE within Chomsky's (1998) Theory of Attraction. The data, both written and spoken, come from different sources. Given that we are a speaker of the language, part of the data come from our intuitive knowledge and everyday conversations with friends, students and colleagues. The other part is from a scrutiny of…

Previous research has revealed that although EFL students may claim to prefer British/US accents they often have difficulty identifying them, especially when such accents may differ from "standard" accents presented in ELT materials. In the Gulf, English is widely used as a lingua franca or as a second language by the large expatriate…

Efficient language use involves the capacity to flexibly adjust to varied pronunciations of words. Although children can contend with some accent variability before their second birthday, it is currently unclear when and how this ability reaches its mature state. In a series of five experiments, we examine the developmental trajectory of toddlers'…

The present study seeks to expand the current focus on acquisition situations in linguistic relativity research by exploring the effects of nativisation (the process by which a L2 is acquired as a L1) on language-specific cognitive behaviour. Categorisation preferences of goal-oriented motion events were investigated in South African speakers who…

Research on the linguistic characteristics of university classroom discourse highlights the salience, in this register, of non-informational and subjective aspects of discourse. This dimension of classroom discourse, however, has not been studied systematically. Taking a corpus-based approach, this study investigates the non-informational…

Adolescence is a time in young people's lives when identities are being constructed and what their friends say is particularly important. The teenage years are a critical period in terms of attitudes to language, yet there have been relatively few studies of student metalanguage and, to our knowledge, no studies which have considered age-graded…