Discusses the varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. Suggests that the varieties grouped under the label Spanish have been immensely enriched over the centuries by contact with other languages. Notes that there is a continuing increase in the presence of Spanish in the United States, and the result is a continued enrichment of the…

Responding relevantly to an information-soliciting utterance (ISU) is required of a school-age child many times daily. For the child with pragmatic language difficulties, this may be especially problematic, yet clinicians have had few data to design intervention for improving these skills. This small-scale study looks at the ability of a child…

Christian missionaries have played a crucial role not only in assisting past and current forms of colonialism and neocolonialism, not only in attacking and destroying other ways of being, but also in terms of the language effects their projects have engendered. The choices missionaries have made to use local or European languages have been far…

Presents a study showing that New Zealanders have very different attitudes to variants that sociolinguists have lumped together in the past suggests that globalization with localization is an important principle for variationists to take into account. (Author/VWL)

There are different ways of exploring and examining the visual medium in the service and disservice of education. A discursive form rather than a visual medium is chosen in this attempt. Utilizing the conceptualizations of Suzanne Langer, Christine Nystrom observed that American symbolic environments have undergone a massive shift from discursive…

Formal language use in online communication and phone messages is increasingly being replaced by a new age language, i.e. the net lingos commonly used in Internet acronyms and text messages. This is, perhaps, a logical consequence of computers, mobile phones and gadgets becoming familiar household items in an era where there is a constant demand…

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research…

Much of curriculum innovation in English language teaching in the context of former colonial countries has been derivative rather than generative, imitative rather than self-initiated or self-regulatory. This trend is in part the result of historical exigencies that made the importation of ELT approaches, methods, and techniques for classroom…

The article explores the transition from the linguistic imperialism of the colonial and postcolonial ages to the increasingly dominant role of English as a neoimperial language. It analyzes "global" English as a key dimension of the U.S. empire. U.S. expansionism is a fundamental principle of the foreign policy of the United States that can be…

This study investigated the intelligibility of Chinese graduate students to their Indian, Chinese, Korean, and American peers. Specifically, the researcher sought to determine the teaching priorities for English for Academic Purposes in the US, where listeners have a wide variety of native languages. Research on Second Language Acquisition…

"The Routledge Applied Linguistics Reader" is an essential collection of readings for students of Applied Linguistics. Divided into five sections: Language Teaching and Learning, Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Identity and Power and Language Use in Professional Contexts, the "Reader" takes a broad…

This study investigated how the speech act of refusal is realized in Egyptian Arabic by intermediate and advanced American learners of Arabic as a foreign language. It also compared the performance of the learners to that of native speakers of Egyptian Arabic and native speakers of American English. The study aimed to investigate the relationship…

Much has been written about the necessity of having a standard variety for a particular language. There has also been a great deal of literature on the emergence of a particular variety to be the standard language for a multidialectal language community. This report attempts to look at the various types of choice of a standard language or the…

This paper focuses on the idea that the study of language standards and standard languages must make reference to a different level of consciousness from that associated with the sort of naive language production in which the question of standards does not arise. Consciousness of language refers to the activity of reflecting upon the use of…

The Diola-Fogny of Senegal, West Africa, socially intuit with the meta-linguistic terms "big" and "thin" the tense/lax vowel contrast that is basic to their phonology. The two terms are primarily used to identify speech variation among individuals and groups. (Author/RM)