This paper examines the way Higher Education (HE) students use metaphors to make tangible the lived and living experience of learning. The article provides a contemporary development of the ethnographic paradigm by offering a new model termed "proximal ethnography" to capture the sense of inside-out-inside research, of being what one has…

This paper tries to give answers for successful receptive multilingualism (RM) but also for its failure. It is mainly based on the results of two projects, one on inter-dialectal communication in the Baltic area during the era of the Hanseatic League and the other analyses inter-Scandinavian communication today. The main purpose of this survey is…

This paper presents profiles of eight multilinguals and examines the circumstances that determine their continued use, in addition to English, of at least two of their "home" languages. I attempt to identify in which domains this occurs, whether there are established patterns of domain-specific language use and whether these patterns are…

The major purpose of this project was to assess and review the principal role of ICT in supplementing the General Quality Improvement program (GEQIP) in Western Harerghe, Ethiopia. The project also further analyzed the contribution of Information Communication Technology (ICT) to the indicators of GEQIP like quality, equity, access and internal…

The effects of birth order have been debated in many disciplines and have been shown to be important for a number of outcomes. However, studies examining the significance of birth order in language development and practices, particularly with regard to minority languages, are few. This article reports on two sets of data collected among Spanish…

This article investigates how two young newcomers navigate an institutional policy of "English only" in a Finnish primary school and how this policy impacts opportunities for voice. From a discourse analytic and sociolinguistic perspective, the analysis takes an ethnographic path to a focal event of language conflict in the classroom.…

This article investigates the language attitudes, language practices and identity construction of a group of ethnic minority students in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Drawing on data from focus group and individual interviews, this research shows that the ethnic minority students negotiate and contest their heritage identity by utilizing their…

This qualitative case study explores how a novice foreign language teacher negotiated personal and professional identities and positioned herself and students in relation to classroom and broader cultural communities through pronouns. The participants included a Turkish teacher and six students at an American university. The teacher's use of…

In an era when familiar categories of identity are breaking down, an argument is made for using post-structuralist vocabulary to talk about ethical practical action in mathematics education. Using aspects of Foucault's post-structuralism, an explanation is offered of how mathematical identifications are tied to the social organization of power. An…

Sociolinguists have been fighting dialect prejudice since the 1960s, but deficit views of non-standard English are regaining currency in educational discourse. In this paper I argue that the traditional sociolinguistic response--stressing dialect systematicity and tolerance of "difference"--may no longer be effective by questioning a key…

The study examines the sustainability status of Sarawak indigenous languages through a survey on adolescents' language use using the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS). The specific aspects examined were: the presence of ethnic languages in relation to other languages in selected domains of language use; the adolescents'…

This paper will discuss two issues related to Japanese retirees adopting Malaysia as their second home. The first is that of the preferred language choice of the retirees. To collect data for language choice a self-report questionnaire was administered and an interview was conducted. The findings suggest that the majority of the retirees chose…

This author's reading selection for his class provoked an unexpected response: when one of the main characters in the reading "came out of the closet," the students divided themselves into those who were willing to discuss the issues, and those who weren't.

Reentry Shock had been studied through psychological symptoms and inter-relationship problems. Previous research also focused on quantitative data of post-experience questionnaires. This dissertation examines how reentry support programs help students during the reentry process and how participants integrate the study abroad experience into their…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to examine the impact of Web multimodality plus dialogical interactions in the acquisition and retention of novel lexical items among EFL students under a social constructionist framework. The lexical acquisition of 107 1st-year English majors at the University of Costa Rica was analyzed through…