Over the years, less attention is given to students' spelling skills compared to other areas of literacy achievement like word reading and passage comprehension in relationship to nonmainstream dialect usage. Considering that English spelling is based on the phonological and morphological structures of Mainstream American English (MAE), it is…

Historically, middle grade schools doled out the harshest and most exclusionary discipline to adolescent African American males. African American males were routed along school to prison pathways at rates higher than African American females and their peers from other racial backgrounds. National conversations about exclusionary discipline…

James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi'an Jiaotong…

South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a…

The paper examines the experiences of graduate international students in the United States as they construct meanings out of their lived experiences. These meanings reflect their social and academic perceptions of their host nations and what in turn end being their social reality. Fifteen students were interviewed and data was coded and analyzed…

Recounting a successful means of introducing other Englishes, the author encourages understanding and acceptance of devalued Englishes among mainstream-English-speaking students.

This paper explores the presence of Spanish form of address vos in the university Spanish classroom discourse from the perspective of Language Management Theory. Under this model, language management is understood as any type of activity that influences language or communication, in other words, language or language use (Nekvapil & Sherman,…

The use of ICT in education has benefitted both students and educators in the education field. Currently, the social networking sites are being used widely by the university students in their daily lives for various purposes such as entertainment, networking, as well as education purposes. There are many studies conducted to figure out whether the…

This paper aims at examining language socialisation practices of members of two groups of migrants of Nigerien origin living in Ghana, i.e. Tamasheque-speaking beggars in Accra and Hausa/Zambarima/Buzu-speaking hawkers at the Akuapem Ridge. We examine the migrants' language practices in various domains, such as work and home, interrogate whether…

Limited scholarship has examined the relationship between pervasive intellectual, cultural, and racial stereotypes and their role in establishing and perpetuating psychological anguish. This effect can potentially hinder the academic success and use of healthy coping mechanisms among African American women students. Using Black feminist thought…

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the 'South', who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities…

There has been much research conducted on second language writing. In addition, there exists a significant amount of studies conducted with African American student writers. However, the fields of Second Language Writing and Composition Studies rarely if ever dovetail in the research literature. The purpose of this article is to argue how English…

In North American English (NAE) and British English, [ae] and [open back unrounded vowel] are open vowel phonemes which are articulated by a speaker easily without a build-up of air pressure. Among all English vowels, the greatest problem for most Turkish majors of English is the discrimination of [ae] and [open back unrounded vowel]. In English,…

Scholars have long debated whether Old and Middle English (ME) are different diachronic stages of one language, or whether they are two closely related languages that have different historical roots. A general assumption is that Middle and Modern English descend from Old English (OE), similar to the way Middle and Modern German descend from Old…

Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) is a thriving national sign language used by tens of thousands of signers in Kenya, and which emerged out of two deaf schools in western Kenya in the early 1960s. In this thesis, I provide a thorough description and analysis of the basic phonological components of the KSL lexicon used in the southwestern region of Kenya…