With a view of standardized testing as a situated local practice that serves "global" agendas, I examine the specific ways that this bureaucratic mechanism receives, sorts, arranges and classifies adult learners of English; inspires certain pedagogical practices; and fosters identities desired by the new global economy. Relying on data gathered…

Purpose: The authors' purpose was to explore the nature of the link between hearing loss (HL) and language impairment in adolescents with mild-to-moderate hearing loss (MMHL). Does language performance (generally or in certain areas) normalize at adolescence? Method: The language skills of 19 French-speaking adolescents (ages 11-15) with moderate…

The collection of papers, dedicated to Maria Antonieta Alba Celani, a celebrated English professor in Brazil, consists of writings by colleagues on four themes: developments stemming from Dr. Celani's Brazilian national project for the teaching of English for special purposes; language teacher training; language processing; and analysis of…

This paper examines: (1) the use of questions by children at different levels of proficiency in Spanish and English, and (2) the congruency between the language constructs used to measure language proficiency and the natural language repertoire of children as seen in video-tapes of classroom interaction. A quantitative analysis of the data…

Drawing on recent psychological and neurological research on how individual differences might interact with learning a particular language, the study examines how psycholinguistic research and theory can help in assigning military personnel to language training and to a given language. Using the Defense Language Institute's Defense Language…

This article argues for the use of teacher-generated corpora in content-based courses. Using a content course for engineering and architecture students as an example, the article explains how a corpus consisting of texts from textbooks and journal articles helped students learn grammar, vocabulary, and writing. The article explains how the corpus…

The programs WordSmith and VocabProfile were used to research lexical differences between essays written in English by Spanish undergraduates and a set of essays independently judged as being of TWE grade 6 standard. The results indicated that writing by this group of students was generally characterised by low lexical variation, a preponderance…

Recent research on Chinese orthography is reviewed in a discussion of the relationship between orthographic symbols and reading processes. Specifically, these issues are addressed with relation to research findings: the difficulty of learning Chinese logographs, particularly with regard to learning disabilities and biliteracy; whether reading in…

The debate over whether primates can be taught visual language is examined, and evidence of use of nonverbal language in primate studies is compared with the language criteria of a number of linguistic researchers. Background information on language, visual language (including sign language), and the parameters of the studies is offered, including…

Part of a more extended study, a study used discourse analysis to examine how instructors and students talk about sexist language in an attempt to discover their implicit language theories. Subjects, six instructors and six undergraduate students chosen from a convenience sample at a large western university, were interviewed and asked to comment…

A study of national identity and social integration in two multilingual societies, Canada and Switzerland, examines the relations between Quebec and anglophone Canada and between French and German Switzerland. First, the historical setting for the emergence of multilingualism is outlined for both countries, and the demography of the major language…

This paper describes the Foresee Approach, a recently developed model for integrating content, language, and learning strategies instruction in the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) or part ESL classroom. The Foresee model is an extension of Chamot and O'Malley's Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA), resembling the latter in…

This paper documents a culturally specific language strength for developing number sense among Oneida- and Lakota-speaking primary students. Qualitative research methods scaffolded this research study: culture informants were interviewed and interviews were transcribed and coded for analysis; culture documents were selected for analysis; and…

A study was undertaken to describe how special education teachers explained and viewed their teaching through use of metaphorical language, and how these compared with the responses of regular education teachers in previous research. Subjects were five certified special education teachers of children with mild disabilities. Data were drawn from…

The use of verbal report procedures as a research tool for gaining insight into the language learning process is discussed. Specifically, having second language students complete think-aloud protocols when they take cloze tests can provide useful information about what is being measured and how it has been learned. Use of such introspective…