This paper reports on the use of ethnolinguistic vitality as the framework for a sociolinguistic survey measuring attitudes to multilingualism and reporting on the experiences of a community of Northeast Thailand (Isan) that forms part of Thailand's largest minority. The aim of the study was to examine the experiences of participants in a…

This study intends to shed light on the most occurring grammatical and lexical (pragmatic) errors which students make in their compositions. For this purpose, 23 male and female undergraduate students from different majors were asked to take part in the present study. Each week, for four weeks, students were asked to write 4 compositions on…

This article focuses on the learner's use of Code-switching to learn the TL (Target Language) equivalent of an L1 word. The interactional pattern that this situation creates defines the Request-Provision-Acknowledgement (RPA) sequence. The article explains each of the turns of the sequence under the combination of the Ethnomethodological…

The present study explores the use of the first language in a context of foreign language teaching. This qualitative research presents the classroom practice and points of view of French and English teachers and students within a public educational institute in central Mexico using the techniques of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews.…

Similar concerns about the development of children's creative writing abilities in Kenya and South Africa prompted two Mother Tongue (MT) education practitioners in Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy of Linguistics (MILL) to undertake parallel intervention studies to increase teachers' competence…

Code Choice in the Language Classroom argues that the foreign language classroom is and should be regarded as a multilingual community of practice rather than as a perpetually deficient imitator of an exclusive second-language environment. From a sociocultural and ecological perspective, Levine guides the reader through a theoretical, empirical,…

This dissertation investigates the role of grammatical gender facilitation and inhibition in second language (L2) learners' spoken word recognition. Native speakers of languages that have grammatical gender are sensitive to gender marking when hearing and recognizing a word. Gender facilitation refers to when a given noun that is preceded by an…

This paper examines whether students involved in CLIL are able to learn content through the medium of L2 and simultaneously exhibit significant gains in L2 vocabulary knowledge. Two experiments were set up in two public primary schools. Two groups of 6th grade students participated in each experiment. The first group was taught three 80-minute…

In contrast with the field of second language acquisition (SLA), where until recently sociocultural concerns were largely unaddressed (Block, 2007), identity has always been at the core of heritage language (HL) education. The present article highlights this often overlooked history and presents action research centering on a Spanish critical…

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax-semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

This paper draws on three years of fieldwork within informal supported play-groups in inner Sydney. In Australia, some 40% of children reach school age without attending formal preschools. Aboriginal and immigrant groups are greatly overrepresented in this statistic. For these children, informal playgroups, funded from a range of government and…

Discussions of multilingualism in education, as exemplified by the articles in this issue, can be critically reevaluated using perspectives available from poststructuralism. These perspectives focus on the potential ambiguity of language and language practices. This, in turn, encourages us to question simple notions of the relationship of learners…

This article identifies empirical evidence (Dao, 2007; in preparation) conflicting with Processability Theory's (PT) prediction that in acquisition of English as a second language (ESL), plural-marking emerges first in bare nouns and only later in numeric expressions. Specifically, it presents results from Dao's (2007) cross-sectional study of ESL…

This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal study in which two instructional methods to teach agreement features to first-year university students specializing in Spanish in Japan are compared. On the one hand, the control group was exposed to the traditional top-down teaching of agreement paradigms and were instructed to practice them…