This paper is derived from a wider study of literacy practice that examines and explores the role played by Qur'anic literacy in the lives of men, women and children in a UK Muslim community. It also draws on the significant body of theoretical work being developed by Gregory and others on the role of siblings and older children in literacy…

Contesting the monolingualist assumptions in composition, this article identifies textual and pedagogical spaces for World Englishes in academic writing. It presents code meshing as a strategy for merging local varieties with Standard Written English in a move toward gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence for…

The theme of this book cuts across disciplines. Contributors to this volume are specialized in education and especially classroom research as well as in linguistics, most being transdisciplinary themselves. Around 65 sub-Saharan languages figure in this volume as research objects: as means of instruction, in connection with teacher training,…

The changes in post-apartheid South Africa have been accompanied by considerable changes in the education system. The most notable include desegregation of schools, development of a National Qualifications Framework, adoption of new language policies for education, and introduction of outcomes-based curricula. However entrenched assessment…

In this study of the placement of sentence negation in third language acquisition (L3), we argue that there is a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true second language (L2) and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Although there is considerable evidence for L2 influence on vocabulary acquisition in L3, not all researchers believe…

The authors developed a qualitative study to seek the feedback of service providers with regard to the usefulness of the Ages and Stages Questionnaire: Social Emotional as a screening tool for multicultural populations. They addressed provider satisfaction with the tool by surveying a multidisciplinary sample of practitioners who provide a range…

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from…

Globalization is on everyone's tongue, and the discussion is not only limited to economic exchange, but expands to the intermingling of cultural values. To be truly successful in the international arena, whether as an immigrant, student, businessperson, or tourist, openness toward other cultures is vital and the most obvious door to those cultures…

This article addresses two key challenges that globalization poses to literacy research: the need for new models of literacy and literacy education, and the stakes of adopting multiliteracies pedagogies in different contexts--that is, the tensions between competing hegemonic discourses of collective identity in the public sphere of ethnolinguistic…

A major controversy in education in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been the choice of language for initial literacy education. It is now generally accepted by academics, education leaders, and politicians that this should be a language already spoken by the learner. Research suggests that this will contribute to better, not worse skills in English at…

The large scale movements of refugees in many areas of the world are having dramatic impacts on indigenous cultures, languages, and literacies. Both anecdotal evidence and research suggest that the experience of uprooting and displacement creates an increased demand for literacy, new forms of literate expression, and more multilingual…

Three phases mark the instruction of indigenous languages since the precolonial period. Nigeria has more than 200 native languages, and the problems of instruction involve national language policy, the capabilities of the languages to cope with modern life, lack of prepared teachers, lack of understanding of language structures, teaching…

In this study of ability to learn Japanese, six extra-linguistic factors were investigated: multi-linguality, semantic space sensitivity, formal education, Japanophilia, musical training and the introduction of Kanji (ideographs used in Japanese writing). (CK)

A discussion of the preservation of minority group languages, especially when the group is very small, in a pluriglossic community focuses on the situation of German in Sauris, Italy. The arguments commonly advanced against total linguistic assimilation into the majority language group are examined. Implications in support of minority language…

A list of 103 books, articles, working papers, and other publications focuses on two areas of research on multilingualism: (1) studies of two language groups learning a common third language and transfer from non-native and native languages in foreign and second language learning (78 entries); and (2) other linguistic and psycholinguistic works on…