Research suggests that listener perceptions of a speaker's oral language use, or a speaker's "comprehensibility," may be influenced by a variety of speaker-, listener-, and context-related factors. Primary speaker factors include aspects of the speaker's proficiency in the target language such as pronunciation and…

While the metaphor of students bringing linguistic, cultural, and community resources to classrooms abounds in mathematics education research with non dominant students, teachers seem not to benefit from such metaphoric language as most of them struggle to figure out how such resources can be used during mathematics instruction. This paper urges a…

Environmental education researchers have long identified a connection between formative play experiences in nature settings and pro-environmental behaviors (i.e., career paths) of their subjects later in life. Most studies have been post-hoc retrospective looks that have not had the ability to assess causation. As more children are removed from…

The papers in this volume offer a sampling of contemporary efforts to update the portrayal of study abroad in the applied linguistics literature through attention to its social and cultural aspects. The volume illustrates diversification of theory and method, refinement of approaches to social interactive language use, and expansion in the range…

For their 61st annual conference, the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER) met in St. Petersburg, Florida. This year's conference theme was "Engaging All Readers through Explorations of Literacy, Language, and Culture," which was also used as the title for this year's "Yearbook." This "Yearbook"…

The authors use Noam Chomsky's theories about generative grammar to discuss the notion of linguistic creativity they believe lies at the core of storytelling as Salman Rushdie pictures it in his novel, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." The production of meaning through the use of narrative helps explain the rules of the literary game,…

A major concept in special education is "people first language." It connotes that the person's name should precede the disability. For example, it is unacceptable to say "an autistic child." It is more acceptable to say "a child with autism." However, some authors in the field question the need for using a label at…

With the conceptual framework of RFT and the instructional and measurement elements of PT, the current investigation was concerned with expanding core language skills as a means of impacting derived relational responding. The language training employed frequency-building procedures that targeted increasingly abstract descriptions of objects. The…

Construction grammars (Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987; Langacker, Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical pre-requisites, Stanford University Press, 1987; Croft, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University…

Tutoring is one of those skills which require the ability to communicate an in-depth understanding of the subject. This article is about scaffolding while tutoring, and the tutoring talents described can be applied across the curriculum. Lev Vygotsky's ideas about communication and education play a key role in the development of scaffolding…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe the nature of informational (expository) language in terms of unique grammatical characteristics and discuss applications for assessment and intervention for older school-aged children and adolescents with language impairments. Methods: Information presented is based on a selected literature…

Magic has to do with the supernatural and the unnatural. It is indifferent to natural law and science and is aloof from scientific inquiry. Its existence depends upon unquestioning faith. Granted such faith, it is extraordinarily potent. If it does not move mountains, it convinces the faithful that it can. It can damage health and perhaps, restore…

In recent years there has been a striking shift in both academic and popular discourse on the subject of male-female differences. It is increasingly common for biological explanations to be proposed for differences that had previously been treated by most investigators as effects of socio-cultural factors. This article critically examines the…

This article illustrates an approach to therapeutic supervision informed by a philosophy of solidarity and social justice activism. Called a "Supervision of Solidarity", this approach addresses the particular challenges in the supervision of therapists who work alongside clients who are subjected to social injustice and extreme marginalization. It…

Biased language related to sexual orientation is used frequently among students and is related to prominent social concerns such as bullying. Prejudice toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals also has been examined among adolescents, but separately from these behaviors. This study tested whether biased language use was…