Students from families with little formal education often learn rules about how to speak, behave, and acquire knowledge that conflict with how learning happens in school. They also often come to school with less background knowledge and fewer family supports. Formal schooling, therefore, may present challenges to students living in poverty.…

This paper reports on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the language socialisation of a group of Moroccan adolescents who migrated to Italy in the late 1990s. The approach is based on the notion of language socialisation, which sees the process of acquiring a language as linked to that of becoming a member of a culture. The participants live in…

LEGO[R] therapy and the Social Use of Language Programme (SULP) were evaluated as social skills interventions for 6-11 year olds with high functioning autism and Asperger Syndrome. Children were matched on CA, IQ, and autistic symptoms before being randomly assigned to LEGO or SULP. Therapy occurred for 1 h/week over 18 weeks. A no-intervention…

Teachers are often unaware that bilingual students often switch between their languages when doing mathematics. Little research has been undertaken into this phenomenon. Results are reported here from a study of language switching by sixteen Year 4/5 Iranian bilingual students as they solved mathematical problems in an interview situation. Reasons…

Our research project was guided by the assumption that students who learn to understand phenomena in everyday terms prior to being taught scientific language will develop improved understanding of new concepts. We used web-based software to teach students using a "content-first" approach that allowed students to transition from…

A number of arguments appeared in the late-nineteenth-century United States about "correctness" in language, arguments for and against enforcing a standard of correctness and arguments about what should count as correct in language. Insofar as knowledge about and facility with "correct" linguistic usage could affect one's standing in the social…

In recent years, an increasing number of university students in Canada speak a home language other than English, which can put added pressure on the kinds of linguistic, cultural, and academic support they may require in their tertiary education and in the workplace. Indeed, communication difficulties can surface in the workplace for students…

This article examines the efforts of a school in a Mexican community in Chicago to help children and parents capitalize on the language and culture of their 2 worlds. It builds on the concepts of border crossings and hybridity, metaphors used to describe the sociocultural and linguistic reality of people living transnationally. Some US communities…

Foreign language (FL) teachers and students may have very similar or disparate notions of effective teaching, and the intersection of the two sets of beliefs has ramifications for language learning and the effectiveness of instruction. Horwitz (1990), Kern (1995), and Schulz (1996) have argued that mismatches between FL students' and teachers'…

The study examined the longitudinal association of parental involvement in Head Start parent-focused programs, parenting behaviors, and the cognitive development of children by specifying two longitudinal growth models. Model 1 examined the longitudinal effects of the parental involvement in three Head Start parenting programs (parenting classes,…

We have noticed a change in the use of prepositions in English. In our work with student essays, we increasingly encounter non-standard uses of prepositions, such as "concern on," "afraid from," and "enamored with." This trend is evident in both native and non-native American English speakers. We believe that the…

The term "pragmatics" is commonly used in two quite different senses. In linguistic discourse, "pragmatics" refers to the strategies (exploitation of shared knowledge, assumptions about communicative intent, etc.), by which language users relate the dictionary/grammar meaning of utterances to their communicative value in…

The comparison between various language policies that aim to manage multilingual communication ought to rely on some robust methodology for evaluation. This paper discusses the possibility to found such a methodology on the well-established concepts of efficiency and fairness. Assessing efficiency implies comparing how resources are allocated…

In the early 1980s, the Hawaiian language had reached its low point with fewer than 50 native speakers of Hawaiian under the age of 18. Outside of the Ni'ihau community, a small group of families in Honolulu and Hilo were raising their children through Hawaiian. This article shares the perspectives of three pioneering families of the Hawaiian…

Two-year-old bilingual children can show sensitivity to the language choice of their interlocutor, but do not necessarily achieve perfect separation by discourse context, e.g. speaking only French with a French interlocutor; dominance in one language is often cited as a reason for this. In this study we asked whether older bilingual preschoolers…