A large body of research in the conceptual change tradition has shown the difficulty of learning fundamental science concepts, yet conceptual change schemes have failed to convincingly demonstrate improvements in supporting significant student learning. Recent work in cognitive science has challenged this purely conceptual view of learning,…

Given the rapid growth in international contacts worldwide, English is increasingly becoming the chosen medium to facilitate communication among people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. However, the question remains as to how non-native speakers of English of varying levels of proficiency, using different varieties of English, are…

We are at a particularly difficult historical juncture marked by uncertainty, contingency and change. Zygmunt Bauman characterises the present time as "liquid modernity" (2000, 2008, 2011b) because of the fluidity and instability that we live with. Our identities and our relations to the world are changing radically. There is an urgent need for…

This article is derived from a small study conducted within a larger qualitative study into the nature of the responses of mainstream primary teachers in a non-metropolitan area in Australia to the Sudanese refugee English Language Learners (ELLs) in their classes. It reports on findings in relation to teachers' attitudes toward the use of their…

The use of mother tongue in teaching in a multilingual setting affects the way pupils learn. A melting pot and the educational center of the North, Baguio City, Philippines demands teaching strategies that not only adapt to the interplay of the different cultures and languages but give importance to them, too. Specifically, this paper analyzed the…

"Review of Research in Education: Vol. 38, Language Policy, Politics, and Diversity in Education" explores the role of educational language policies in promoting education as a human right. There are an estimated nearly 7,000 living languages in the world. Yet, despite the extent of language diversity, only a small number of the…

This article reports the results of an action-research project that examines enhancing students' English learning processes through the selective use of their mother tongues with the aim of overcoming their reluctant attitudes toward learning English in the classroom. This study involves forty ninth-graders from an all-girls public school in…

Purpose: This paper aims to progress the dialogue on language rights in the urban classroom. Research has evidenced how language can serve as a powerful tool in mainstream ideologies; more specifically, the preferred and dominant use of Standard Written English in the American classroom has demonstrated how language serves as a gatekeeper for…

This study draws on the concepts of instrumental and expressive orders to analyse school practice in two Anglophone and two Francophone primary schools in Cameroon, and how micro processes of language socialisation in the schools studied instantiated Anglophone and Francophone education traditions and related to macro processes of systems of…

This article discusses the implications of "multicompetence" (Cook, 1991), defined as an individual's knowledge of more than one language, for language assessment. The growing psycholinguistic evidence highlighting variability in native speaker performance as a result of multicompetence is reviewed, evidence that further questions the validity of…

Though attention to academic language is a key component of the Teacher Performance Assessment and the new Common Core Standards, little has been researched regarding how pre-service teachers build academic language knowledge and integrate it into their practice teaching experience. This study focuses on the construction and delivery of academic…

This dissertation is focused on analyzing phonological contact between Slavic and non-Slavic languages in southeastern and northeastern Europe, with the particular goal of describing how the social context of language contact interacts with linguistic factors to shape the outcome of contact-induced change. On the basis of case studies drawn from…

In this qualitative study eight international scholars and practitioners of English were interviewed in order to understand their viewpoints about how English language teaching is evolving from a role of English as a Foreign Language to one of English as an International Language in this contemporary world in which there are more nonnative…

This year's volume of the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (CSCTFL) Report centering on the conference theme of MultiTasks, MultiSkills, and MultiConnections focused on the importance or world language use within the classroom and beyond with articles extending the conversation on target language use in instruction,…

While we hold that cultural colonization in English teaching in the cross-cultural context is a legitimate concern, we argue that when overstretched it tends to ignore the complex power relations within a culture by imposing homogeneity on it. It may also fossilize the role a foreign language can play in a multilingual context, which, we believe,…