I adopt a poststructural perspective to argue that the current focus in mathematics education on measuring, reducing, and explaining the achievement gap is dangerous and can be counter-productive to the equity-oriented arguments that those mobilizing "gap" language want to make. The reiteration of the achievement gap in scholarly arguments can…

A main objective in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) is to enable students to communicate effectively in many situations and contexts. This involves being able to control a wide range of language functions, which are how speakers use language for requesting, congratulating, apologizing, complaining, consoling, and promising, among many…

"Wireless" is the word selected to illustrate a model of analysis designed to determine the specialized character of a lexical unit. "Wireless" belongs to the repertoire of specialized vocabulary automatically extracted from a corpus of telecommunication engineering English (TEC). This paper describes the procedure followed in the analysis which…

Non-linguists' perceptions of language in use are generally considered to be strongly influenced by evaluative factors: attitudes, values and ideology. Such a perspective represents a somewhat biased approach to ordinary people's knowledge about language, which is characteristic of both sociolinguistics and its sub-branch, perceptual dialectology.…

A colloquium presented at the Second Language Research Forum on 16 October 2008 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Many commercial images and names linked to Native Americans are created for and perpetuated by popular culture and stem from past linguistic usage. In this article the authors present a case study of the questionable naming and the quiet, almost unnoticed, righting of a name for a Native derived garment in the American clothing industry, the…

In the linguistics field, liaison in French is interpreted as an indicator of interactions between the various levels of language organization. The current study examines the same issue while adopting a developmental perspective. Five experiments involving children aged two to six years provide evidence for a developmental scenario which…

Teachers certainly appreciate the importance of an inviting classroom environment. The money spent on posters, the greeting at the classroom door, and the time invested in learning students' names all help to create a sense of community, and students who feel they belong are more likely to do their best work. No teacher would deliberately exclude…

Language is a part of culture, and plays a very important role in the development of the culture. Some sociologists consider it as the keystone of culture. They believe, without language, culture would not be available. At the same time, language is influenced and shaped by culture, it reflects culture. Therefore, culture plays a very important…

Language is an effective tool of human communication system. It is the basis for social, cultural, aesthetical, spiritual and economic development and growth of every human being. It is the destiny of any professional who is hardly in need of an excellent command over English language. Every organization demands effective and excellent…

In this study, we compared the referrals for special education evaluation of U.S. mainland-born children with those of mostly Latino non-mainland-born children in two school systems in the Northeastern United States. The investigation focused on whether there was a significant difference between referrals for special education from each group,…

This dissertation is a sociolinguistic study of the ideologies about language, culture and ethnicity among Japanese immigrants and descendants in Brazil (hereafter, Nikkeis) who gather at a local Japanese cultural association, searching for what it means to be "Japanese" in Brazil. This study focuses on how linguistic behaviors are…

This report provides information on the SAT and trends in test performance for the years 2004, 2005, and 2006.

There is a clear and explicit expectation for immigrants in the United States to learn the English language as part of their schooling, and there is too often a tacit understanding that immigrants are to lose their heritage language (HL) at the same time. Most second-generation immigrant children remain monolingual in their HL until they enter…

Foreign language proficiency and learning are crucial parts of many study abroad programs; especially those whose host culture language is different than that of the native language of students electing to study in them. Indeed, how a program organizes itself regarding pre-departure language proficiency requirements, on site language learning, and…