Examines the way Italian-Canadian youth negotiate their identities through their language practices. Views identity as multiple and shifting and shows how eight Italian-Canadian youths in Toronto lean on different aspects of their identities through their daily linguistic and cultural practices across and within multiple worlds. (Author/VWL)

This study investigated the effects of teaching mothers of low socioeconomic status (SES) to use decontextualized language during storybook reading with their preschool-age children. A multiple baseline design across behaviors and participants evaluated the effects of the intervention for five dyads. Mothers' and children's use of decontextualized…

Group work offers a viable alternative to the teacher-centered, direct instructional model. However, many teachers have been reluctant to incorporate extensive group work into their teaching repertoire, citing concerns about the amount of English used and off-task behavior. This study reports the results of an analysis of five conversations of…

This research note reports on a study to investigate what English language skills are used by new graduate employees in their daily work in various departments in four banks in Hong Kong. Through interviews with 16 new bank employees across these four banks and the use of questionnaires, my aim was to determine what proportion of their daily…

The purpose of this research was to discover whether the children (aged 9 to 11) were thinking while taking part in practical science activities. One method the author used was to video the activity and then watch the replay with each child in turn. She was then able to ask them what they had been thinking about at each stage. The majority of the…

This paper investigates the verbal construction of emotions in a bilingual/bicultural setting, the target languages and cultures being American English and Cypriot Greek. To examine whether bilingual speakers express different emotions in their respective languages, a study was carried out with 10 bilingual/bicultural professionals. A scenario was…

The goal of this paper is to discuss the role of emotion-related factors in language choice in bi- and multilingual families. Most of the time, factors other than emotions govern language choice and use in such families, among them language dominance, social context and linguistic competence of the interlocutors. However, quantitative and…

In this paper, the authors explore a methodology for assessing learners' meta-pragmatic awareness of variation in French language use. "Meta-pragmatic awareness" is defined as knowledge of the social meaning of variable second language forms and awareness of the ways in which these forms mark different aspects of social contexts, and is therefore…

This paper reports on an empirical study of street language, a multilingual youth register in the Netherlands. Nearly 300 secondary school students completed a questionnaire on their acquaintance with and use of street language. A subsample of students was also interviewed. Use of street language will be related to background information about the…

This article explores the nexus between digital literacies and identity in the online graphical chat environment of the "palace". With a focus on the adolescent cybergirl, it examines how girls use words and images to create a digital presence, and in so doing, "write" their bodies and their selves. I discuss how the cybergirl is discursively…

The development of pragmatic and sociolinguistic rules of language use is important for language learners. It is necessary to understand and create language that is appropriate to the situations in which one is functioning, because failure to do so may cause users to miss key points that are being communicated or to have their messages…

The multifaceted ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs) engage in "acts of identity" (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) through their language use have created new challenges for ESL pedagogy. Heterogeneous identities have called into question the native speaker construct and the assumed links between ethnicity and language expertise.…

The purpose of this study is to provide a microanalysis of differences in adaptive functioning seen between well-matched groups of school-aged children with autism and those diagnosed as having Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, all of whom functioned in the mild to moderate range of intellectual impairment. Findings…

This article describes a learning context in which the first grade classroom teacher creates a learning community where she uses different teaching strategies to encourage children's second language use and learning. The first graders share, discuss, and learn both the second language (German) and content.

This article examines a subset of acculturation items pertaining to language fluency and use and to interpersonal relationships. This study included 3,050 Mexican American elders aged 65 to 99, randomly sampled from five states in the southwestern United States. A standard acculturation inventory was used as the source for two factor-derived…