Pacific students' success has been under discussion by Pacific scholars for decades and, using traditional academic measures, their academic success does not compare well with other ethnic groups. Despite the identification of this problem, specific and practical actions to counter it appear not to be well understood by classroom teachers. This…

Our research explores how people learn as part of everyday contexts and settings and specifically, we explore the discourse of an online affinity space for diabetics, where participants engage in knowledge sharing and storytelling around disease management. We frame the analyses by examining participants' meaning making discourse for advancing…

Many educators use informal math language to make the content more accessible for middle school students, yet this use of informal language may have unintended consequences. Informal language may hinder students' development of a deep math lexicon and understanding of concepts and procedures across grade levels. Becoming proficient with math…

The interaction between working memory and language processing is widely discussed in cognitive research. However, those studies often explore the relationship between language comprehension and working memory (WM). The role of WM is rarely considered in language production, despite some evidence suggesting a relationship between the two cognitive…

Individuals entering college from disadvantaged economic backgrounds often face multiple obstacles to successful academic performance. Nonetheless, many such students are successful. In this study, we explore the personal characteristics of students from poverty who do well academically in comparison to their economic peers who were less…

Language choices in the economic field of late capitalist societies are shaped by a combination of local, national, and global forces as well as historical, political, and economic factors. This study conducts an analysis of language choices in the linguistic landscape of Macao's heritage tourism (i.e. signposts of tourist attractions) and gaming…

The Common Core State Standards (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010) feature argumentative writing across the curriculum in grades 4 through 12, yet little is known about how young adolescents develop the challenging advanced language and literacy skills needed for these tasks. This study explored productive academic language use in the…

A challenge in reading research, and particularly extensive reading research, is how to manage the transition from the top of graded reading schemes to authentic texts which may be separated from each other by up to 5,000 word families. While texts written for native-speaker children have been recommended at times, recent research has shown that…

Purpose: Attention and language are hypothesized to interact in bilingual children and in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). In children who are bilingual, attentional control may be enhanced by repeated experience regulating 2 languages. In children with DLD, subtle weaknesses in sustained attention may relate to impaired…

Heterosexist phrases on college campuses can contribute to negative consequences among lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and other sexual minority students (LGBQ+), however, their relationship to academic outcomes remains under-researched. This analysis investigates hearing the microaggressions "that's so gay" and "no homo" on…

Lo Bianco (Curr Issues Lang Plan 9(2):155-178, 2008) proposed an "ensemble of [three] activities" that comprise language policy: the "textual," "discursive," and "public performance" (p. 157). When expressed in language, the current study proposes that each of Lo Bianco's three activities (text, discourse,…

Purpose: This study aimed to explain creative thinking patterns, including imaginative thinking, divergent thinking, and lateral thinking of students in scientific work. The scientific work studied was in the form of the Student Creativity Program at Malang State University, Indonesia. Research Methods: This study used a qualitative approach with…

What are the linguistic resources for teachers who pray in contemporary Catholic school classrooms? This article considers the intersections of prayer and language practice, and makes central two arguments. The first is that educational prayer--a particular type of teacher-led extemporaneous prayer in Catholic schools--is a linguistic phenomenon,…

In this corpus study, it is asked whether young children speaking European French build their early syntax around grammatical or lexical words. Specifically, the study examines the relationship of grammatical and lexical words in three types of syntactic structures (determiner--noun, pronoun--verb and subject pronoun--verb). The corpus included…

Researchers of minority language media are increasingly interested in the role of internet-based communication in language usage, maintenance, and revitalisation. This study explores the use of hashtags signifying the Welsh/Cymraeg, Frisian/Frysk, and Irish/Gaeilge languages on Twitter. Acknowledging the challenges of interpreting social media…