The purpose of this study was to investigate the learning that takes place when people with disabilities interact in a rehabilitation context. Data were generated through in-depth interviews and close observations in a 2 one-half week-long rehabilitation program, where the participants learned both wheelchair skills and adapted physical…

This article presents the contextualised interpretive analysis of communicative practices (artefacts including a song and a comic strip) developed by economically disadvantaged secondary students from two Brazilian public schools. Students' uses of standard and popular languages stretch and problematise social and cultural constructions about what…

This paper investigates the code-switching behaviour of two native speaker teachers teaching their mother tongue--French and Korean, respectively--to predominantly English monolingual students in New Zealand secondary schools. A close analysis of these teachers' classroom discourse and their perceptions about classroom language use reveals a range…

In this article, we examine how youth in one urban high school talked about race and racism while participating in a curriculum that introduced the analytic lens of story types (stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories, and counterstories) to look at race and racism and engage these issues through storytelling and the arts. We draw on…

This study examines the multilingual and multiliteracy practices of a group of Tibetan female youths from South Asia (India, Bhutan, Nepal) newly arrived in Toronto, Canada (N = 24). The main data are derived from a questionnaire surveying their language practices across contexts indicating the roles of education, community, and society in…

Since the post-Soviet context is not particularly well known to the majority of readers, the author uses this introduction to provide a general background against which developments in particular post-Soviet countries can be better understood. The author begins by placing these developments in the sociohistoric context of language policies of the…

This article examines 9-11 year olds' attempts to beat the computer at a game of strategy and asks how far and under what circumstances they developed a strategic approach to the game. Extracts from videotape transcripts are analysed to reveal the components of children's particular approaches, evident even amongst children who did not develop an…

This article examines a classroom discussion of multiple interpretations of the scales on two distance versus time graphs. The analysis describes how two students and a teacher used multiple meanings for phrases of the form "I went by" and coordinated these meanings with different views of the scales. Students' ambiguous and shifting meanings did…

This article focused on the investigation of the differences in the frequency of language learning strategy use by successful and unsuccessful first-year students of a Chinese university. The study found that successful students used a wider range of learning strategies for EFL learning significantly more frequently than unsuccessful students. It…

Throughout the 20th century, international communication has shifted from a plural use of several languages to a clear pre-eminence of English, especially in the field of science. This paper focuses on international periodical publications where more than 75 percent of the articles in the social sciences and humanities and well over 90 percent in…

This essay attempts to answer some of the basic assumptions made about English as a global language. It is argued that such assumptions, especially those concerning political and economic power, are not sufficient in themselves to explain why English has acquired such global importance. Rather, what has greatly contributed to the possibility for…

Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals can vary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic…

A dearth of research has investigated the language preference of bilingual childhood populations and its subsequent relationship to reading skills. The current study evaluated how a sequential bilingual student's choice of language, in a particular environmental context, predicted reading ability in English and Spanish. The participants were…

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home…

This article critically reflects on the GUN CONTROL simulation (Salies, 1994a) by retaking ideas advanced by Salies (2002) and applying them to the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing classes in Brazil. It examines how controlled practice relates to learners' performance on the first draft in a simulation-based content unit…