African Americans students, who use African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in the academic setting, receive negative misconceptions by English educators. Negative teacher attitudes might cause African American students to lack commitment to learning. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine whether English teachers…

Most studies on bilingual phonological awareness suggested that children who were able to speak a second language performed better in phonological awareness tasks; some studies however found different results. This study revisited the issue by investigating the effect of Min dialect experience on Chinese children's Mandarin phonological awareness.…

This dissertation presents new research on the "Bavarian Quantity Law" (the BQL) in the northern Bavarian dialect of Hahnbach. Building upon earlier investigation of the BQL (cf. Bannert 1976a,b for Central Bavarian) this study examines the historical, phonological, and phonetic motivations for this feature as well the variability in its…

The problem of culturally decontextualised mathematics education faced by Nepali students, teachers and teacher educators has often been oriented by the view of the nature of "mathematics as a body of pure knowledge," which gives rise to an exclusive emphasis on an ideology of singularity, epistemology of objectivism, language of…

Purpose: This paper introduces Stroud's 'Linguistic Citizenship', a concept committed to democratic participation, to voice, to the heterogeneity of linguistic resources and to the political value of sociolinguistic understanding. Approach: It first outlines Linguistic Citizenship's links with the ethnographic sociolinguistics inspired by Hymes,…

Dialects of English spoken in rural, Southern Appalachia are heavily stigmatized in mainstream American culture, and speakers of Appalachian dialects are often subject to prejudice and stereotypes which can be detrimental in educational settings. We explored the experiences of rural, Southern Appalachian college students and the role speaking a…

Young people with English as an Additional Language/Dialect backgrounds are often identified in public health messages and popular media as "bodies at risk" because they do not conform to the health regimens of contemporary Western societies. With increasing numbers of Chinese students in Australian schools, it is necessary to advance…

The purpose of this study was to examine second graders' (n = 680) changing spoken nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use in relation to their oral language and reading comprehension achievement. Fall NMAE production was negatively associated with fall achievement scores. NMAE production generally decreased from fall to spring. Students who…

Looking at the frequently used English words on billboard ads in Jakarta main streets, one may have a presumptive thought that English will dominate Indonesian language. The assumption, though, has led to the analysis of the role of both languages on billboard ads and the possibility of English control over Indonesian. The study presented…

We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for…

In a series of two experiments, we examined 5-year-old children's motivations for learning new conventional actions. Children watched two teachers open a novel container; the teachers differed in the nonfunctional, conventional actions they used in the process. In Experiment 1, one teacher spoke with a native accent and the other spoke with a…

Dominant notions of what constitutes a "language" and what a "dialect" within a continuum are entirely based on sociopolitical factors (i.e. the "languages by 'Ausbau'" of Kloss), totally disregarding structural and communicative aspects. This paper argues that such stance is no longer tenable in view of the modern…

Efficient language use involves the capacity to flexibly adjust to varied pronunciations of words. Although children can contend with some accent variability before their second birthday, it is currently unclear when and how this ability reaches its mature state. In a series of five experiments, we examine the developmental trajectory of toddlers'…

Oral language is a critical component to the development of reading acquisition. Much of the research concerning the relationship between oral language and reading ability is focused on children, while there is a paucity of research focusing on this relationship for adults who struggle with their reading. Oral language as defined in this paper…

This article addresses teachers' uptake of Black and Latina/o youth linguistic repertoires within the official space of an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom and how youth respond to corrective feedback that is focused on the form of their messages, rather than their function. Corrective feedback offered by one Latina teacher indexed larger…