This article analyses an assessment initiative known as the Basic Competency Assessment (BCA) in Hong Kong using Bernstein's performance and competence models of pedagogic practice. On the one hand, BCA is aligned with a competence model through its official projection as a low-stakes, student-focussed and formative assessment. However, an…

In this article I reflect on Turnbull's reframing of foreign language education through a bilingual framework. I argue that in order for this important shift to be generative, foreign language education must shed the strong link between language and nation-state that has been at the core of foreign language epistemologies. That is, foreign…

The international classification of functioning, disability, and health for children and youth (ICF-CY) developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) is a framework for understanding concepts of disability specific to children and youth. This framework has been used in countries around the world to support the education of children with…

Given the emergence of a specific trope in social network services, whereby individuals upload an image that includes a passport and/or a boarding pass to index their status as a traveller, this article explores multilingual and multimodal creativity in the construction of identity by a body of individuals who pass through Paris' Orly airport. In…

Coding is a process of assigning meaning to a given piece of evidence. Evidence may be found in a variety of data types, including documents, research interviews, posts from social media, conversations from learning platforms, or any source of data that may provide insights for the questions under qualitative study. In this study, we focus on text…

An ongoing debate in phonology concerns the extent to which the phonological typology is shaped by synchronic learning biases. The two best-studied types of synchronic bias are complexity bias, a bias against formally complex patterns, and substantive bias, a bias against phonetically unnatural patterns. While most previous work has focused on…

International assessment of academic documents by post-secondary institutions and other bodies represents a complex field guided by quality assurance frameworks, formal conventions and best practice. This research study seeks to illuminate this complexity by examining current practices, constraints, perspectives, and possibilities for transfer and…

Studying history offers us important lessons: it helps to point out concepts which repeat and suggests errors so that we can adjust our path. This study attempted to uncover changes in higher educational mission statements over time in the western New York area. By exploring changes in institutional mission statements, the researcher hopes to add…

More than 40 percent of students in California's public schools speak a language other than English at home. In the 2016-17 school year, 21 percent of all students, or more than 1.3 million, were English Learners (ELs). When former English Learners are included, the population of "ever ELs" expands to 38 percent of all K-12 students in…

This report describes research carried out over two distinct reclassification eras between the 2002-03 and 2013-14 academic years in the Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) and San Diego Unified School Districts (SDUSD). Using student-level data and the multiple reclassification policies, the researchers are able to discern whether reclassification takes…

In the forty plus years since passage of the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act" (IDEA), special education has grown in the number of students and amount spent on services. Despite this growth, the academic performance of students with disabilities (SWDs) remains troubling low compared to general education students (GENs). To…

Cyberbullying has become a serious global issue. Previous studies focusing on the prevalence and the consequences of cyberbullying have paid little attention to its linguistic features, especially in celebrity cases. This current study fills this gap by investigating the language that constitutes cyberbully toward celebrities from different…

This theoretical study aims at raising awareness of the existence of lexical false friends (FFs) in English and Arabic as genetically unrelated languages. It also provides a general categorization for FFs from a semantic point of view. A sample of more than fifty FF pairs is examined by contrasting their form, pronunciation and meaning. The…

The present paper examined the errors occurring in the use of English in the linguistic landscape of Tehran, the capital of Iran. To this end, a total of 400 bilingual (Persian and English) and multilingual signs (Persian, English and Arabic) were culled from the landscape of the city in a course of eighteen months. Having analysed all the signs,…

Ticuna (ISO: tca) is a language isolate spoken in the northwestern Amazon Basin (Brazil, Colombia, Peru). Ticuna has more speakers than almost all other Indigenous Amazonian languages and -- unlike most languages of the area -- is still learned by children. Yet academic linguists have given it relatively little research attention. Therefore, to…