This article explores the links between multilingualism, the personality trait Tolerance of Ambiguity (TA), and attitudes toward linguistic variation among 379 mono-, bi-, and multilingual adults who completed an online questionnaire. A self-reported high level of proficiency in multiple languages, short- and long-term residence abroad, and high…

This study aims at examining Thainess as a writing strategy used in non-literary texts written by non-professional bilingual writers. These writers are advanced language learners who are pursuing their Master's degree in English. Seven English narratives of their language learning experiences were analyzed based on Kachruvian's framework of…

The meaning of some phrasal verbs can be guessed from the meanings of the parts (to sit down = sit + down, run after = run + after) and the meaning of some others have to be learned (to put up (a visitor) = accommodate, to hold up = cause delay or try to rob someone) due to their syntactic and semantic complexities. In this regard, the syntactic…

In this position paper, the author argues for the re-conceptualization of English language teaching (ELT) through the socio-cultural and context-based approach (SCA). For a typical English as a foreign language (EFL) situation, SCA takes as a point of departure a thorough understanding of the macro-level components e.g., local classroom…

This study explores wh-in-situ in CamE within Chomsky's (1998) Theory of Attraction. The data, both written and spoken, come from different sources. Given that we are a speaker of the language, part of the data come from our intuitive knowledge and everyday conversations with friends, students and colleagues. The other part is from a scrutiny of…

The issues surrounding native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) as teachers (NESTs and NNESTs, respectively) in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) are a current topic of interest. In many contexts, the native speaker of English is viewed as the model teacher, thus putting the NEST into a position of…

In today's complex, multicultural world, discourses and language vernaculars are more diverse than ever. Educational institutions often privilege the historically dominant vernacular (such as white middle-class English which is sometimes called "Standard English"). This language bias disadvantages students form working class and…

Using Jamaica, a former British colony where Jamaican Creole (JC) is the mass vernacular but Standard Jamaican English is the official language, as an illustrative case, this critical ethnographic study in three Jamaican schools examines the theoretical and practical challenges of language education policy (LEP) development and implementation in…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

This article reports on a questionnaire-based investigation of writing strategies used by Singapore primary school pupils. A sample of 1,618 pupils from two local primary schools participated in the study. A number of one-way ANOVA analyses were run to measure the relationship between the participants' use of writing strategies and their English…

Previous research has revealed that although EFL students may claim to prefer British/US accents they often have difficulty identifying them, especially when such accents may differ from "standard" accents presented in ELT materials. In the Gulf, English is widely used as a lingua franca or as a second language by the large expatriate…

Efficient language use involves the capacity to flexibly adjust to varied pronunciations of words. Although children can contend with some accent variability before their second birthday, it is currently unclear when and how this ability reaches its mature state. In a series of five experiments, we examine the developmental trajectory of toddlers'…

The present study seeks to expand the current focus on acquisition situations in linguistic relativity research by exploring the effects of nativisation (the process by which a L2 is acquired as a L1) on language-specific cognitive behaviour. Categorisation preferences of goal-oriented motion events were investigated in South African speakers who…

Research on the linguistic characteristics of university classroom discourse highlights the salience, in this register, of non-informational and subjective aspects of discourse. This dimension of classroom discourse, however, has not been studied systematically. Taking a corpus-based approach, this study investigates the non-informational…

Adolescence is a time in young people's lives when identities are being constructed and what their friends say is particularly important. The teenage years are a critical period in terms of attitudes to language, yet there have been relatively few studies of student metalanguage and, to our knowledge, no studies which have considered age-graded…