The transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an…

This study reports on the dilemmas of practice experienced by a parent-school facilitator, Melanie, within a large urban school district. Melanie struggled to reconcile her commitment to families in her school with the demands placed on her by an administrative ideology that viewed families as adversaries. Her attempts to manage the conflicts…

There has been a long-standing debate about how 'English' can be defined. Educational policy changes have typically been driven by differing representations of the subject, and have ranged from broad 'aesthetic' definitions to more narrow 'functional' views. The present study aims to analyse areas of consensus and contention in stakeholders'…

Purpose: This paper aims to outline the misguided underpinnings of the "word gap" concept promoted by Hart and Risley (1995). This concept posits that a "30 million word gap" between children of poverty and those from affluent households accounts for widespread academic disparities. Based on this premise, there has been a…

The proliferation of online simulation games across the globe in many different languages offers Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) researchers an opportunity to examine how language learning occurs in such virtual environments. While there has recently been an increase in the number of exploratory studies involving learning experiences of…

Given the Common Core's dual emphases on mathematical modeling, there is a need to understand modeling as a practice and content standard to develop students' mathematical modeling skills. This study of 12 students from differing levels of mathematics instruction and English Language proficiency includes analysis of their modeling with mathematics…

To meet the demands of today's society and working life, higher education should support the development of learner agency. How the agency of individual learners emerges in university courses and what kind of agency empowers the learners to face new challenges should be considered. In this article, the focus is on learner agency enabled and…

For learners of Japanese, a conundrum arises at university level as they are expected to be able to shift between direct and indirect language in various writing tasks. The apparent indirectness in inductive language is required of regular writing tasks such as response essays and e-mails, while the directness of deductive academic writing, a…

This research study is based on the analysis of speech in three Spanish conversation classes. Research questions are: What is the ratio of English and Spanish spoken in class? Is classroom speech more predominant in students or the instructor? And, are teachers' beliefs in regards to the use of English and Spanish consistent with their classroom…

Background: Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However,…

Although many studies have explored shared book reading between preschoolers and their families, very few have examined this practice within a large, nationally representative sample. Using the ECLS-B dataset, this study investigated shared reading among nearly 700 families of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Coding of…

Investigations of early vocabulary production often employ a single method to measure children's word use. This study examined expressive vocabulary development in children aged 1;0-2;6 years through a combination of picture naming, caregiver report and language sampling. The participants were predominantly exposed to Maltese at home, with…

The education policies of 1988-2003 and 2004-2015 in The Gambia make provisions for the use of the L1 or area languages to serve as the media of instruction from Grades 1 to 3 and as school subjects from Grade 4 onwards. However, the policy on the use of L1 for teaching has not been implemented and what is practised instead is the use of English…

The data reported in this article come from a large project whose goal was to explore how Latin American students in Catalonia, Spain use their two languages--Spanish and Catalan--to support their learning of mathematics in small groups with other students who are Spanish- or Catalan-dominant. For 5 years, lessons from bilingual mathematics…

This study examined the quality of preschool teachers' interactive conversations with three- and four-year-olds in two Head Start classrooms serving children from low-income families in the United States. Over a period of 20?weeks, 10 bi-weekly observations of conversations (totaling 15?h per classroom) were conducted in one small-group (Play…