This article presents findings from a study that explored the values and practices of early childhood teachers working with children and families from diverse cultural backgrounds in three early childhood centres in New Zealand (Mitchell et al., 2015). The research aimed to identify effective teaching practice that weaves the cultural capital of…

This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative study which investigated a group of English as a second language (ESL) university students' perceptions of their global identities in intercultural English as a lingua franca (ELF) communication at an international university in Hong Kong. Drawing on data collected via in-depth interviews and…

Concluding a two-part "American Annals of the Deaf" special issue on deafness and diversity (DAD), the editors provide reflections and guidance to the field regarding d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) children with a disability (DWD; e.g., learning or intellectual disability, autism) and d/Dhh children from homes where parents use a…

Due to the increase in the number of preschool-aged dual language learners (DLLs), there is a need to understand their language development and how to better support them. Although DLLs' language development has traditionally been studied from a structuralist perspective, few have examined their language use from a functional approach, which…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

More than 80 individuals representing staff from state departments of education, school districts, other countries, testing and testing-related companies, and other educational organizations participated in a forum on June 20, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to discuss the need for common accessibility language across assessment platforms. The…

Proverbs, which have been evaluated as a very rich heritage of collective wisdom and experience in society, are loved by people who prefer spicing up a conversation with the tips of wisdom to 'convince' others to 'prove' their point of view and actions. The paper explores semantic models of proverbs which denote the status of children in the…

The aim of this descriptive statewide study is to decipher reclassification practices in California -- the state that educates 20% of the nation's English language learners (ELL) and enrolls more language-minority students than any other state in the union. In the course of our investigation, we examined reclassification criteria from a…

This study aimed to analyze the gender sensitivity of English grade 9 material through evaluation of texts and pictorial presentations. In addition, it modified the grade 9 material tasks through localization and contextualization of the investigated gender-insensitive texts and pictures. This assessed as well, the acceptability of the modified…

What strategies does a female writer develop to overcome her anxiety of correcting the moral decadence in her society? Inappropriate as the use of pornography and profanity must have always seemed, Amma Darko has managed to put some positive and meritorious spins on them and seriously use them. In this paper, we examine how in two books,…

This article examines a new phenomenon in language activism variously called the multilingual education working group or the multilingual education network, and abbreviated as MLEN. After an analysis of the conceptual and organizational contexts for these activist groups, the six MLENs in existence as of 2013 are described. The groups are then…

Drawing on nearly 20 years of study of a variety of languages in North East India, from the Tai and Tibeto-Burman families, this paper examines the issues involved in studying those languages, building on three well established principles: (a) tones are categories within a language, and the recognition of those categories is the key step in…

Words that are part of colloquial English but used differently in a technical domain may possess lexical ambiguity. The use of such words by instructors may inhibit student learning if incorrect connections are made by students between the technical and colloquial meanings. One fundamental word in statistics that has lexical ambiguity for students…

Learning science interpreted in existing theoretical frameworks often means that students are assimilated, accommodated or enculturated from the entity of the vernacular world to the entity of the scientific world. However, there are some unsolved questions as to how students can best learn purely a new language or new knowledge of science. The…

This article presents evidence from a linguistic analysis conducted on the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCFTE) 2009, and explores the dialogic characteristics of the document driving the current reform of teacher education. I address one orienting research question: in what ways and to what extent are the aims and…