This article describes the Virtual Intercultural Team Tool (VITT) and discusses its processes and benefits. VIIT is a virtual platform designed with the aim of assisting European project teams to improve intercultural communication and build on their cultural diversity for effective implementation of their projects. It is a process-focused tool,…

While language aptitude has been investigated actively within second language research, there is a current dearth of research on the effects of aptitude in cases of attrition. The aim of the present investigation was to explore the role of language aptitude for L1 proficiency in speakers who experienced a break with their L1 setting prior to…

Cambodian Americans are a fairly recent language minority group in the United States; most families arrived in the United States as refugees during the 1980s. Over the past 30 years, there has been great concern in the community regarding the maintenance loss of their native Khmer language. This article provides an historical and contemporary…

The study investigates educated Arab's preference for using foreign words in Arabic oral discourse. A corpus of commonly used English/French words was collected. A sample of language and translation students and faculty was tested and surveyed to find out whether they were familiar with the Arabic equivalents to foreign words commonly used,…

There is often confusion about distinctions between growth models and value-added models. The first half of this paper attempts to dispel some of these confusions by clarifying terminology and illustrating by example how the results from a large-scale assessment can and will be used to make inferences about student growth and the value-added…

The issue of parental involvement (PI) in education is notable for the extensive rhetoric supporting it and considerable variation in the reality of its practice. It is proposed that the gap between rhetoric and reality in PI has come about because of the influence of factors at the parent and family, child, parent-teacher and societal levels…

Recent studies of Asian American youth language practices have presented compelling insights about the identities and migration experiences of young people of Asian descent. This article offers a detailed examination of the relationship between language use and select issues concerning Asian American youth, including social life, schooling,…

A significant and growing English learner (EL) population attends public schools in the United States. Evidence suggests they are at a disadvantage when entering school and their achievement lags behind non-EL students. Some educators have promoted full-day kindergarten programs as especially helpful for EL students. We take advantage of the large…

The purpose of this study was to explore young children's understandings about their peers with disabilities as manifested in their daily interactions in classroom and school routines. Using an ecological perspective, children's expressed views about their peers with disabilities were also explored, to examine how these understandings are situated…

This study deals with unplanned terminology development in the subject field of economics within media discourse. It examines how economic terms in Turkish newspapers emerge, are used, and cease. This developmental process is also analyzed through productivity of economic terms and the factors affect them. The subject terms are also analyzed as a…

One interactive resource that may present the potential to significantly affect the personal lives of today's collegians is the virtual collegiate community, e.g., Facebook or MySpace. These are examples of a virtual communities or social networks, where students can post information about themselves in order to make connections, both on and off…

Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Since British colonial settlement in the early 1800s, Maori children have been predominantly educated in an English-speaking system dominated by colonial governance. In this institution, Maori children have been constructed as deficient learners, primarily in relation to a colonial curriculum taught…

Constituent structure is considered to be the very foundation of linguistic competence and often considered to be innate, yet we show here that it is derivable from the domain-general processes of chunking and categorization. Using modern and diachronic corpus data, we show that the facts support a view of constituent structure as gradient (as…

This paper considers the processes of using folk stories for the teaching of community languages in a UK complementary school. We look at the appropriation of folk stories by teachers to teach young people Mandarin while also considering their possibilities as heritage texts. We consider how the teacher and students use the folk story as…

The psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic perspective of language acquisition requires some essential conditions in vocabulary acquisition: (a) repetitive practice, which allows for data to reach long-term memory, and thus become proceduralised and automatised; (b) how relevant the lexical items are regarding the communicative needs of the learners…