This article proposes a pedagogy of multiliteracies for Mexican indigenous groups. Using the Multiliteracies Framework developed by the New London Group (Cazden, Cope, Cook, Fairclough, Gee, et al., 1996), specifically the notions of "multimodality" and "design," it is argued that many "illiterate" indigenous people…

The focus of this paper is on immigrant minority languages in urban Western Europe. Both multidisciplinary and cross-national perspectives will be offered on two major domains in which language transmission occurs, i.e., the domestic domain and the public domain. Prototypical of these two domains are the home and the school, respectively. At home,…

This paper presents some considerations on teaching L2 rhetorical conventions in university-level multilingual classrooms. It is claimed that if L2 students need to acquire versatile writing skills in L2 to be given a voice in the discourse milieu of the receiving society, they should also have the right to preserve their L1 cultural perspective.…

This paper describes multiple Estonian-Russian language contacts in Estonia. For synchronic microsociolinguistic research it is usual to concentrate on the impact of a sociolinguistically dominant language A on an immigrant/minority language B. In the Soviet setting, the dominant language was usually Russian (despite Russians being a minority).…

Symbolic internationalization is an elementary feature of industrialized society. The phenomena accompanying foreign language use will affect daily habits of communication as long as commercial advertising, mass media entertainment, and cosmopolitan approaches remain part of modern life styles. A national language no longer suffices to satisfy all…

This digest reports on findings from recent literacy surveys and interprets these findings in light of theoretical and definitional issues involved in estimating literacy; examines approaches commonly use to measure literacy and enumerates concerns about the limitations of these approaches in linguistically diverse contexts; and concludes with a…

The normalization of French and the selection of German as a second language over the traditional Alsatian is discussed. The teaching of the dialect has more often than not been promoted as an argument against German, and not as a serious proposition. The author encourages some bilingual education. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

This study analyzed the acquisition of the interactional competence in an environment where children used two or three languages every day. Two aspects were examined: the acquisition of culturemes such as thanking and greeting, and the comprehension of indirect requests. The bilingual children observed were eight Swedish-Estonian children, six…

A sub-thesaurus of language teaching terms was compiled as a supplement to the EUDISED Multilingual Thesaurus. The sub-thesaurus includes three lists: (1) an alphabetized cross-referenced list of English descriptors to be added to the Multilingual Thesaurus; (2) an alphabetized English list of additional descriptors and the French and German…

This article attempts to present an exhaustive, fully-documented discussion of recent and current work around the world on questions related to French/Dutch multilingual contact in Brussels. An attempt has been made to go beyond mere bibliographical listing to an evaluation of everything of importance written around this topic, primarily in the…

This paper defines diglossia as "a situation in which two closely related language systems enjoy differing social status, one being the 'high' and the other the 'low' language," and then attempts to show how a study of diglossia in Canada, where such a diglossic situation is seen to exist among varieties of French, might be carried out.…

A comparison was made of the performance in an automatic information retrieval environment of user queries and document abstracts available in natural language form in both English and French. The results obtained indicate that the automatic indexing and retrieval techniques actually used appear equally effective in handling the query and document…

The current status of world literacy can be revealed through recent UNESCO data: (1) the nations of the world spend an average of $7800 annually to train and equip one soldier, while spending only an average of $100 annually to educate one child; (2) a quarter of the world's population will not attend any school in this century; (3) more than 40…

Examines perspectives on language transfer in the light of a body of data regarding a beginning learner of French whose native language was English but who also had some knowledge of Irish, Latin, and Spanish. (Author/CB)