This research builds on several layers of meaning representing views from education officials, head teachers, teachers and pupils to investigate the discourse and implementation of official bilingualism policy in primary schools in Cameroon. While at the macro-level, the celebration of the "National Bilingualism Day" in schools has…

Given the cross-cultural differences underlying interactional routines such as "How are you?" or "How was your weekend?", managing such routine inquiries can be problematic for second language learners. Based on data from an adult ESL (English as a second language) class, this conversation analytic study shows how learners develop their competence…

This literary analysis examines constructions of normalcy and disability within contemporary young adult literature, including "Jerk," "California" (Friesen, 2008), "Marcelo in the Real World" (Stork, 2009), and "Five Flavors of Dumb" (John, 2010). As recent winners of the Schneider Family Book Award from the American Library Association, these…

Recent literature on language teaching has questioned the established view that a language is most effectively taught monolingually, arguing instead that the student's own language has an important role to play, and this view is now widely accepted. While this literature draws attention to the extremism of some monolingual approaches, and…

This article is based on research conducted on the topic: "Safety and security in schools: The case of KwaZulu-Natal." For the research project a purposive sample consisting of secondary school learners, teachers, school governing body chairpersons and principals were selected from the rural and township schools used in this study to…

This review paper constitutes the first step within a larger research effort to develop an interactive pragmatics learning tool for second and foreign language (L2) learners and users of English. The tool will primarily endeavor to support pragmatics learning within the language use domain "workplace." Given this superordinate objective,…

The aim of the current study is to investigate the impact of counselling-based training on online peer support by comparing the interventions of trained peer supporters as opposed to non-trained peer supporters. Two independent raters analysed 746 support posts published during a period of one year at the "Student to Student" online peer…

The researchers examined transcripts of comments made and dialogues engaged in by children, teachers and student teaching assistants during a 10-week enrichment programme for gifted and talented children aged 7-9 years. Attempts were made to match these utterances with the programme's aims and aspirations as expressed in a promotional document.…

It has been common to use video records of instruction in teacher professional development, but participants have rarely been encouraged to evaluate teachers and students' actions in those records, allegedly because evaluation deters from the development of a professional discourse. In this study, we inspected teachers' online discussions of…

This article examines high school teachers' engagement of newcomer English learner students' prior knowledge. Three central research questions guided this study: 1) To what extent do teachers function as mediators of their students' prior knowledge? 2) What goes into teachers' thinking about how and when to elicit prior knowledge? and 3) How do…

This article uses a conversation analysis methodology to examine how lexical Focus on Form is interactionally accomplished in teachers' vocabulary explanations in secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms. Recent conversation-analytic work has focused on the interactional organisation of vocabulary explanations in…

This paper discusses the complex and competing language ideologies that Korean educational migrant families in Singapore hold about the normativity and legitimacy of English language varieties. During their educational migration in Singapore, Korean families show ambivalent attitudes toward the local variety of English in Singapore, Singlish.…

This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7-2;3) and a subsequent…

This study explores the writing of Wikipedia articles as a form of authentic writing for learners of English in Hong Kong. Adopting "Second Language Socialization and Language Learning & Identity" approaches to language learning inquiry, it responds to an identified shortage of research on computer-mediated language socialization.…

Reflecting an international trend, Australian education policy increasingly charges schools with fostering active citizens who have the will and capacity to improve the democratic fabric and drive needed social change. This policy prescription also resonates with some teachers' critical commitments to pedagogical practices that encourage young…