Taking the measure of an individual as a professional and trying to place that individual within a discipline's changing historical context is never an easy endeavour. This is especially true within the helping professions where there has been so much growth over the past 40 years. In the case of Martin J. Ball, however, the task is a bit easier.…

This article explores how language and the multisemiotic nature of mathematics can present potential challenges for English language learners (ELLs). Based on two qualitative studies of the discourse of mathematics, we discuss some of the linguistic challenges of mathematics for ELLs in order to highlight the potential difficulties they may have…

If, as the linguistic turn has taught us, there is no representational knowledge, but more agreements and/or struggles over how to talk and learn about what we call reality, we need to address and analyse the consequences of different vocabularies of educational phenomena and schooling, in order to better understand and make use of both the…

Scientific discourse is characterized by multi-semiotic construction and the resultant semantic expansions. To date, there remains a lack of analytical methods to explicate the multiplicative nature of meaning. Drawing on the theories of systemic functional linguistics, this article examines the meaning-making processes across language and…

Following a well-established tradition going back to the 1980s (cf. Volterra 1987/2004), the authors use the name Lingua dei Segni Italiana (Italian Sign Language [LIS]) for the language used by Italian deaf people (and by Swiss deaf people living in the Ticino canton). LIS is becoming more and more visible, and its status as a minority language…

Haznedar (2007) argues that longitudinal data from a child learner of English who has Turkish as a first language (L1) constitute a counterexample to the Aspect Hypothesis. In this commentary, we show that her argument is not warranted because the Aspect Hypothesis does not presuppose that tense is defective, contra her claim. However, Haznedar's…

Much research has explored the extent to which statistical computations account for the extraction of linguistic information. However, it remains to be studied how language-specific constraints are imposed over these computations. In the present study we investigated if the violation of a word-forming rule in Catalan (the presence of more than one…

The traditional division of conditionals into four main types (zero, first, second, and third) has long been called into question. Unfortunately, the awareness that this description does not reflect conditional patterns in actual usage has not generally been reflected in EFL coursebooks. This article re-examines the arguments for a description of…

Research based on naturalistic and checklist methods has revealed differences between English and Chinese monolingual children in their trajectories of learning nouns and verbs. However, studies based on controlled laboratory designs (e.g., Imai et al., 2008) have yielded a more mixed picture. Guided by a multidimensional view of word learning (in…

Several psycholinguistic theories have appealed to the linguistic notion of markedness to help explain asymmetrical patterns of behavioural data. We suggest that this sort of markedness is best thought of as a derived rather than a primitive notion, emerging when the distributional properties of linguistic categories interact with general-purpose…

An informal organisation that is becoming quite influential in the spread of Italian in Italy, as well as abroad, is the "Accademia della Crusca" which began its activities during the Renaissance, under quite different auspices. Founded in Florence in 1582-1583, this Academy was inspired by the theories of Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), a…

Ethnolinguistic vitality theory asserts that Status, Demographic, Institutional Support and Control factors make up the vitality of ethnolinguistic groups. An assessment of a group's strengths and weaknesses in each of these dimensions provides a rough classification of ethnolinguistic groups into those having low, medium, or high vitality. Low…

Stoel-Gammon (this issue) states that "from birth to age 2 ; 6, the developing phonological system affects lexical acquisition to a greater degree than lexical factors affect phonological development" (this issue). This conclusion is based on a wealth of data; however, the available data are somewhat limited in scope, focusing on rather holistic…

The two main models of children's acquisition of inflectional morphology--the Dual-Mechanism approach and the usage-based (schema-based) approach--have both been applied mainly to languages with fairly simple morphological systems. Here we report two studies of 2-3-year-old Polish children's ability to generalise across case-inflectional endings…

After presenting some of the main arguments against certain narrow concepts of second language practice, this article argues that a broader concept of practice, still focused on form or even forms, but with due attention to form-meaning links and with appropriate sequencing of activities to ensure declarative knowledge first, followed by its…