The dialects that college students speak represent a type of diversity that can influence many elements of their experiences in college, including academic experiences. In this study, we examined the influence of speaking a stigmatized dialect on academic experiences for White and African American students (both male and female) from rural…

English teachers, especially those in the field of basic writing, have long debated how to teach writing to students whose home language differs from the perceived norm. This thesis intervenes in that stalemated debate by re-examining "elaborated codes" and by arguing for a type of correctness in writing that includes being correct…

Despite the importance of speech naturalness to treatment outcomes, little research has been done on what constitutes speech naturalness and how to best maximize naturalness in relationship to other treatment goals like intelligibility. In addition, previous literature alludes to the relationship between prosodic aspects of speech and speech…

The plural suffix "-en" ("noot"+"en", "nuts") is pronounced differently by speakers coming from different regions of the Netherlands. In this study, we compared the pronunciation of the plural suffix "-en" in phrases ("noot"+"en kraken", "to crack nuts") with linking…

This study investigated the effect of dialectal difference on identification and rating of severity of speech impairment in children from Indigenous Australian backgrounds. The speech of 15 Indigenous Australian children identified by their parents/caregivers and teachers as having "difficulty talking and making speech sounds" was…

Existing research concludes that diglossia between languages is a barrier to minority language use in health, social care and criminal justice settings. In addition, it concludes that more fulsome service provision is the key for promoting greater minority language use in such settings. Using the case of Welsh speakers in Wales as an exemplar,…

This dissertation establishes the utility and reliability of a statistical distance measure for syntactic dialectometry, expanding dialectometry's methods to include syntax as well as phonology and the lexicon. It establishes the measure's reliability by comparing its results to those of dialectology and phonological dialectometry on Swedish…

Linguists use the concept of "diglossia" to describe any sociolinguistic situation where a low-prestige dialect coexists with a high-prestige one and these dialects are used in different social spheres. Recent observations on Reunion Island have challenged this view because people mix French and Creole extensively in the same utterance…

Considering the role of popular cultural texts in shaping sociolinguistic reality, it makes sense to explore how children actually receive those texts and what conceptualisations of sociolinguistic diversity they form through those texts. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine Greek young children's views on sociolinguistic…

This study investigated the composition of the social network that the homestay offers learners in an intensive summer Arabic language program in diglossic and multilingual Tunisia and examined the types of language socialization as well as the overall linguistic and intercultural competence such opportunities present. The study specifically…

This paper focuses on issues concerning in-service English as an additional language or dialect teachers' views on professional development (PD) in an online environment. On the basis of the data collected via a questionnaire survey and a series of interviews, this study finds that intrinsic and extrinsic incentives compel or impede teachers…

This research examines students' use of African American English (AAE) in classrooms with varying levels of procedural and substantive engagement. In this study, classroom context is examined for type of engagement, turn length, and teacher response to student AAE use. Student AAE use is analyzed by ethnicity, gender, and teacher, and by features…

This article focuses on the development and experiences of two African American Language speakers who are on the precipice of biliteracy and bilingualism. Using a composite counterstory that integrates samples of the girls' language during daily routines as a critical race theoretical analytic tool, we examine their language virtuosity as…

Research in cognitive science and neuroscience has made enormous progress toward understanding skilled reading, the acquisition of reading skill, the brain bases of reading, the causes of developmental reading impairments and how such impairments can be treated. My question is: if the science is so good, why do so many people read so poorly? I…

To examine the role of morphology in verbal working memory. Forty nine children, all native speakers of Arabic from the same region and of the same dialect, performed a "Listening Word Span Task", whereby they had to recall Arabic uninflected words (i.e., base words), inflected words with regular (possessive) morphology, or inflected words with…