Teaching reading to children whose language differs from the oral language of the classroom and from the linguistic structure of academic text adds an additional layer of complexity to reading instruction. There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that language variation impacts reading, spelling, and writing in predictable ways. In…

"Communicate Globally, Teach Locally" observers that the English language has evolved to be the predominant language of business and for communication globally, which allows thousands of NESs to go abroad and work as English teachers in foreign countries. This study assessed how self-efficacy competence of the African American NESs…

The paper reports on the results of a case study of a Year 9 class in a multilingual urban school. The study investigates issues of negotiation, accessibility and (legitimacy of) rights in the classroom's dominant discourse and more specifically the ways in which the Year 9 students of a Private English School in Cyprus negotiate their identity…

The Language Strand of the Australian Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum, Assessment & Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2016b) includes the sub-strand of "Language Variation and Change". This sub-strand is a marked space for discovery and discussion of the history and politics of language use. As such, this sub-strand points to…

In this paper, I use a holographic metaphor to explain the identification of overlapping sign language communities in Panama. By visualizing Panama's complex signing communities as emitting community "hotspots" through social drama on multiple stages, I employ ethnographic methods to explore overlapping contours of Panama's sign language…

My starting point is "Staying Power", an exhibition that aimed to increase the number of photographs representing Black British experience in the UK. The exhibition was recommended by a former pre-service/PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) student who had grown curious about the language and culture of her students. One…

Purpose: The world Englishes (WE) paradigm gravitating around the recent models of English has been theoretically discussed in the applied linguistics profession: that is, English today has gone beyond the general description of post-colonial and institutionalized varieties and is being defined as the linguistic diversity realized by all global…

The authors draw on their own experiences as practitioners, one as a Biology and Agriculture teacher in Kenya, and the other as an educator in a summer science program serving African American youth in a city in the Midwestern United States. They document and analyze moments of language contestation and explore the use of the construct of…

This article centers on the discursive moves that two adolescent girls in rural Appalachia use to negotiate dominant discourses regarding Appalachian identity and language. The data is drawn from a year-long critical ethnographic teacher-researcher study in a senior English class located within a rural high school in the Appalachian region of the…

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the harmful effects of native speakerism in English language teaching, including how perceptions of native speaker status are deeply intertwined with race and national identity. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate how teacher training programs might push back on native speakerism by…

Background: Mother-tongue education in South African primary schools remains a challenge to policymakers. The situation is problematic in multilingual "lok'shin" (township) schools where the "lok'shin" lingua is not recognised as 'standard' language. This article raises the controversial possibility of positioning of…

Sociolinguistic research on language attitudes has revealed that non-standard accented speakers are usually perceived more negatively than members of the dominant speech community. Few studies, however, have examined whether a speaker's ethnicity, evidenced by nonlinguistic factors such as appearance, may play a role in listeners' perception of…

All educational testing is intended to have consequences, which are assumed to be beneficial, but tests may also have unintended, negative consequences (Messick, 1989). The issue is particularly important in the case of large-scale standardized tests, such as Australia's "National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy" (NAPLAN), the…

The study investigated the language choices of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of Chinese family business and the factors guiding their choices. Interviews were conducted with 17 CEOs of family businesses located in Sarawak, some of whom are the sons and grandsons of the founder of the business. The results showed that all the CEOs can speak their…

This paper has two aims. One aim is to consider non-structural (language attitude and use) variables as valid in the field of dialect and linguistic geography in an inner Himalayan valley of Nepal, where four languages have traditionally coexisted asymmetrically and which demonstrate different degrees of vitality vs. endangerment. The other aim is…