A study examining the role of heritage language (HL) competence in social relationships among second-generation language minorities surveyed 114 Korean Americans. HL speakers had a strong ethnic identity and a greater understanding and knowledge of cultural values, ethics, and manners than HL nonspeakers. HL competence also provided professional…

Sets the language policy scene in Sweden in the broader perspective of the ongoing restructuring of global and local linguistic hierarchies. Analyzes myths about global English, the equality of the 11 official languages in the European Union, and the extent to which linguistic human rights are guaranteed. Trends in each of these language policy…

I draw attention to the distinction between reductionist views of "language" and the rich and complex ways in which we might approach language as social practice and suggest the latter view is evident in the set of papers collected here. Socially oriented linguists, including those in New Literacy Studies (NLS), look beyond reductionism, to…

This paper aims to study the current challenges of Chinese language education in the multilingual societies of Hong Kong and Singapore through policy documents. After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the role of "Putonghua" is far more important than before due to political and economic reasons. However, the medium of…

This study is based on the hypothesis that television contents themselves constitute a source of learning through television narratives. In specific terms, we defend the idea that it is possible to teach and learn values through said narratives. Some of the research dealing with the relationship between television and values is categorized from a…

We present a model allowing the measurement of the returns to plurilingual competences in a small open economy, considered as a reduced model of an open European labour market where different nationalities work together and therefore need to communicate either in one or in multiple languages. Our results suggest that high plurilingual competences…

This article addresses the relationship between the call for authenticity, its relocalization in other contexts, and the use of English. Hip-hop forces us to confront some of the conflictual discourses of authenticity and locality, from those that insist that African American hip-hop is the only real variety and that all other forms are…

The purpose of this article is two-fold: first, to explore the role played by linguistic and cultural factors in the mathematics classroom, particularly in relation to diverse learners; and, second, to provide insight into teaching, learning, and professional development that takes into account current mathematics education reform recommendations.…

Joel Spring (2007/this issue) argues that in most nation states around the world today, English plays a central role primarily as a commodity of globalization. At the same time in the United States, English is being perpetuated in nationalistic terms as the only legitimate language. This is done through a variety of mechanisms such as language…

Health-care access for immigrants in the United States is often problematic because of language barriers, lack of health insurance, or differing expectations based on divergent medical systems in the U.S. and the immigrants' home countries. Such difficulties are exacerbated when a linguistic-minority population lives in a rural community that has…

This article examines colonial language policies and practices at the government Central School, Hong Kong--the so-called Eton of the East--in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, seeks to enhance our knowledge of an important episode in Hong Kong's educational history and,…

Lev Vygotsky (1986-1934) was an educational theorist and psychologist of extraordinarily wide knowledge whose major writings deal with the entire learning-teaching-development experience. Despite a wide-ranging interest in Vygotskian theory, the issue of imagination remains outside of the main line of general inquiries into his work. Thus, there…

Maze use appears to be higher in bilingual speakers than in their functionally monolingual peers. One question is whether this is due to the speaker's bilingual status or to the characteristics of the bilingual's language(s). Narratives for 22 Spanish-English bilingual 4-6-year-olds and their functionally monolingual age-matched peers were…

This paper looks at the power of discourses to speak subjects into being, particularly the power that academic and other discourses have had to develop subject positions for international students and the ways in which students have accepted and rejected these ways of talking about them. The paper contrasts these ways of speaking with what the…

Over many years, Kenneth Burke developed theoretical, philosophical, and methodological insights about humans and language. The term he gave to entitle this vast body of work is Dramatism. Rather than the spirit-matter dualism, Burke proposes that scholars direct their attention toward action and motion. By holding that there can be "no…