The Department of Linguistics at University of Victoria (UVic) in Canada has a long-standing tradition of empirical approaches to the study of theoretical and applied linguistics. As part of the Faculty of Humanities, the department caters to students with a wide range of backgrounds and interests, and provides crucial language teaching support in…

Like many EFL teachers of my generation, I side-stepped into the profession. While doing post-graduate research at Oxford in the early 1960s, I took a job one summer vacation teaching English in a local language school. Though I had no idea how to do this, I enjoyed the work, and kept on a few hours' teaching in the next academic year. As time…

Previous research has shown that rhyme and meter--although enhancing prosodic processing ease and memorability--also tend to make semantic processing more demanding. Using a set of rhymed and metered proverbs, as well as nonrhymed and nonmetered versions of these proverbs, the present study reveals this hitherto unspecified difficulty of…

This article addresses a key pedagogical issue of our time: the widespread yet generally unwelcome presence of machine translation (MT) in the language classroom. Studies have repeatedly shown that L2 students consult the most widely used translation tool, Google Translate (GT), in spite of the fact that its use is frowned upon by second language…

The simple view of reading (SVR) proposes that performance in reading comprehension is the result of decoding and linguistic comprehension, and that each component is necessary but not sufficient for reading comprehension. In this study, the joint and unique predictive influences of decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading comprehension…

In this paper we present Kratylos, at www.kratylos.org/, a web application that creates searchable multimedia corpora from data collections in diverse formats, including collections of interlinearized glossed text (IGT) and dictionaries. There exists a crucial lacuna in the electronic ecology that supports language documentation and linguistic…

To answer the question as to the relation of the idea of "Bildung" and the historical and genealogical critique of contemporary culture, this article takes a detour through nineteenth-century German thought to recall the primary ideas, institutions, and processes such as the university, knowledge/scholarship ("Wissenschaft"),…

The fear of technology replacing jobs can be traced back to Aristotle, who, before great technological advances existed, ventured that machines may one day end the need for human labor (Campa 2014). In the current era, there is overwhelming evidence of technological unemployment. This evidence comes in the form of jobs that were once common, but…

Drawing on Michael Cronin's analysis of "Stagecoach," and on narrative theory and image studies, this paper aims to examine the role of language and translation in two classical Hollywood westerns, namely "They Died with Their Boots On" and "Fort Apache." It will consider whether these films provide only negative…

This paper presents selected findings from an assessment of university students' moment-by-moment reading of mathematical proof. This method, adapted from an assessment of narrative reading validated by psychologists, yields novel insights into the strategies students use to construct meaning for the equations in a proof text. In particular, we…

This case study of two secondary English teachers integrates a critical translingual approach in two urban classrooms. Our inquiry is guided by two questions: (1) How did two teachers engage critical translingual approaches in their classrooms? (2) How did their positionalities shape implementation of these approaches? This article illustrates how…

This study is concerned with comparing the pronunciation in Southern Welsh, a Celtic language, and Cockney, an English dialect, regarding the place of articulation. The study uses a comparative method to shed light on the similarities and differences between the two accents. The data were collected from YouTube videos of speakers of Southern Welsh…

This paper sets out to answer two questions by characterizing and deconstructing Alan Davies's seminal views and concepts -- especially his ostensive views and his native speakerism -- within the context of applied linguistics. Arguing that these are some of Davies's seminal views and concepts, it offers a philosophical framing of his ostensive…

A lack of technical vocabulary is a major problem for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners in a foreign setting. In this paper, we argue for using word lists to help learners expand their technical lexis repertoire. Therefore, we propose English word lists in three disciplines constructed from compiled corpora--the Tourism Business Word…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…