While languages education (Liddicoat, 2002) is being transformed by intercultural language learning theory, there is little illustration of either how students are achieving intercultural learning or how to assess it. This article reports on a study of high school language students in Sydney, Australia. Its findings make visible student…

This study tracks changes in three primary characteristics of Early New High German (ENHG) publications from 1499 to 1710: the complexity of the syntactic system of the language, the pictorial saturation of the publications, and the relationship between verbal text and illustrations on the ENHG printed page. Drawing on findings from literary…

As with any field, technology education and its close relatives have numerous strengths and weaknesses. One of these weaknesses has too long been overlooked, and it is the subject of this article. One might think of technology education as empowering students, divergently fostering their own creativity. An abundance of design briefs shows that…

Subjective and objective language data collected in a research project on language variation in north Germany not only reveal information on current linguistic trends in north Germany; they also show how language change in this region is represented in the consciousness of the speakers themselves and described in comments by them. This diachronic…

This paper gives a critical overview of Australian research in the area of immigrant languages, arguing that this field of study is a significant component of the wider applied linguistics scene in Australia and has also contributed to enhancing the broad appreciation of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the country. It shows that research…

Held at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Denver, CO, USA; 21 March 2009. This all-day colloquium was part of an ongoing discussion of ways that methods and frameworks from micro-ethnography, Conversation Analysis (CA), and Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory are re-specifying "language" and "acquisition" from a…

In accord with the general program of researching factors relating to ultimate attainment and maturational constraints in adult language acquisition, this commentary highlights the importance of input differences in amount, type, and setting between naturalistic and classroom learners of an L2. It is suggested that these variables are often…

The constitution of "rhetoric and composition" as a discipline is the subject of a long-standing and ongoing debate that grapples with what each of the terms might be said to signify in relation to the other, and why. Given the multiple meanings of rhetoric and composition, as well as the vexed history of institutional relationships…

Unlike old perceptions of algebra as a subject that needs to be taught in the upper grade levels of schooling, much of the recent research reports that young students are capable of reasoning algebraically. It is important to note that the recommendation to include algebraic experiences in the early grades is not made simply to introduce typical…

This study explores contemporary attitudes to Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Since at least the 1960s, sign languages have been accepted by linguists as natural languages with all of the key ingredients common to spoken languages. However, these visual-spatial languages have historically been subject to ignorance and myth in Australia and…

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

In recent decades, the number of school-aged linguistic-minority students in the United States has increased dramatically. Society at large and public schools in particular must be prepared to respond to these students' needs. In public education, the bulk of this responsibility falls on teachers, who are called upon to apply educational policies…

A key concern for writers is the creation of cohesion in a text, and writers are told by style manuals to avoid the use of demonstratives ("this," "that," "these," "those") as pronouns in order to maintain cohesion. However, previous corpus-based investigations have already revealed that authors of academic texts use demonstratives as both…

Daily conversations contain many repetitions of identical and similar word forms. For bilinguals, the words can even come from the same or different languages. How do such repetitions affect the human word recognition system? The Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model provides a theoretical and computational framework for understanding…

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a relatively new field of enquiry. Before the late 1960s, educators did write about L2 learning, but very much as an adjunct of language teaching pedagogy, underpinned by behaviourism, the then-dominant learning theory in psychology. In this view, the task facing learners of foreign languages was to rote-learn…