This article focuses on children's language alternation practices in two primary school settings. More specifically we explore how participants (children and teachers) in episodes of language alternation invoke linguistic and social identities, thereby "talking into being" language and educational ideologies. The present study is based…

Psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind handles language. There is some lack of consensus as to how far the scope of the field extends, but this article focuses on its most central concerns, namely, how language is acquired, how it is stored in the mind, and how it is processed in use. It aims to build bridges to some of the more important…

Appropriate models for understanding the dynamics of language use in society are essential to effective language policy and planning. Particularly in African contexts, such models must speak to the unique features of multilingual environments, and they must account for the differences in prestige and value which occur between languages in these…

This qualitative study examines the conversations of two preschool teachers with two- and three-year-old children during small-group activity settings in two high-quality child development centers. Using interviews, observations and videotaping of small-group activities, the conversations are characterized in terms of the kind and function of…

It has been increasingly recognised that classroom discourse plays an important social role as a semiotic mediator of knowledge construction with respect to curriculum content. The assumption is that through active verbal engagement with a topic of interest, students are enabled to master the modes of language use associated with schooling--the…

An experiment tested hypotheses derived from self-categorization theory's explanation for gender-based language use. Under high or low conditions of gender salience, men and women sent e-mail to an ostensible male or female recipient yielding either an intra- or an intergroup setting. Gender salience was manipulated so that the stereotypically…

This sixth volume of the Programme for International Student Assessment 2009 (PISA 2009) results explores students' use of information technologies to learn. For PISA 2009, the framework for reading literacy has been developed to encompass reading electronic texts. This has led to an expansion of the description of text types to take account of…

Using a sequential mixed-methods design, this study examined the differences between two native language groups--those with an East Asian language background and those with a Romance language background--in regard to reading subskills as represented in the Michigan English Language Assessment Battery (MELAB) reading test, so as to provide…

This paper uses a methodology that synthesises an Academic Literacies approach and Critical Discourse Analysis to explore student experiences of feedback on written assessments in two higher education institutions. The qualitative analysis of student interviews is oriented around three topics: (1) the socially situated meaning of feedback; (2)…

This measurement study examined the construct validity of the retell component of the Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (Texas Education Agency, University of Houston, & The University of Texas System, 2008a) within a confirmatory factor analysis framework. The role of retell, provided after a one-minute oral reading fluency measure, was…

This dissertation is a study of diverse linguistic resources and contentious identity politics among indigenous Amazonian Kichwas in the city of Tena, Ecuador. Tena is a rapidly developing Amazonian provincial capital city with a long history of interethnic and interlinguistic contact. In recent decades, the course of indigenous Kichwa identity…

The father's role in children's L1 maintenance and L2 learning is a relatively unexplored area. This study considers the L1 and L2 proficiency of 30 Korean-English late bilinguals who immigrated to New Zealand during their adolescence and how their L1 and L2 proficiency is influenced by the language use of family members. Data were collected…

The purpose of this study was to describe and evaluate a promising program model, the Joven Nobel curriculum, for Latino male adolescents that promotes positive youth development and addresses prevention of a number of risk-related sexual behaviors within a cultural context. A quasi-experimental design was used that included a pre- and posttest…

This study examined linguistic patterns in the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, a group that has rarely been studied from a sociolinguistic perspective. Participants were 92 girls, 10-12 years old, who attend a school where Yiddish is the language of instruction and Hebrew, Israel's official language, is studied only in religious…

This article explores the relationships between Applied Linguistics and other related disciplines concerning language use and language teaching issues. It seeks to trace the changes in the view of the relationship between theory and practice in Applied Linguistics, to explain the reason for those changes, and to discuss the implications for…