This article explores the nexus between digital literacies and identity in the online graphical chat environment of the "palace". With a focus on the adolescent cybergirl, it examines how girls use words and images to create a digital presence, and in so doing, "write" their bodies and their selves. I discuss how the cybergirl is discursively…

The development of pragmatic and sociolinguistic rules of language use is important for language learners. It is necessary to understand and create language that is appropriate to the situations in which one is functioning, because failure to do so may cause users to miss key points that are being communicated or to have their messages…

The multifaceted ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs) engage in "acts of identity" (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985) through their language use have created new challenges for ESL pedagogy. Heterogeneous identities have called into question the native speaker construct and the assumed links between ethnicity and language expertise.…

The purpose of this study is to provide a microanalysis of differences in adaptive functioning seen between well-matched groups of school-aged children with autism and those diagnosed as having Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, all of whom functioned in the mild to moderate range of intellectual impairment. Findings…

This article describes a learning context in which the first grade classroom teacher creates a learning community where she uses different teaching strategies to encourage children's second language use and learning. The first graders share, discuss, and learn both the second language (German) and content.

This article examines a subset of acculturation items pertaining to language fluency and use and to interpersonal relationships. This study included 3,050 Mexican American elders aged 65 to 99, randomly sampled from five states in the southwestern United States. A standard acculturation inventory was used as the source for two factor-derived…

In this interview, Gunther Kress proposes how English needs to expand beyond its traditional linguistic frame into a semiotic frame which recognizes not only the visual but other modes. He argues also for a shift to forms of production in which the acts of reflection and meaning-making are fused, rather than separating the production of new…

There is often a resistance to verbal language in the nonverbal arts. Within educational establishments, language does not simply serve the art work or its making; it serves other extraneous goals of legitimation. The link between language and legitimation is striking. Dance education in Great Britain, for example, has recently moved from…

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…

Until recently, research in applied linguistics has tended to treat learners in relative isolation from their context, and to study primarily classroom and other educational contexts. This paper in contrast focuses on the contexts which frame learning, and in particular the resources which these contexts provide. A model is outlined which includes…

This paper proposes a range of improvements to international science communication. It pictures the contemporary language situation in international scientific communication as well as its recent history with the rise of English as its most notable feature and offers explanations for this development. It discusses in which sciences languages other…

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the applicability of task-based language teaching (TBLT) to state secondary foreign language classes. After discussion of method in general, TBLT is defined and its particularities described. Tasks are assessed as the basis for syllabus and then as the basis for method. In both cases, the proposals are…

This study compared phonological features of African American English speakers at 3 grade levels: preschool, elementary school, and middle school. The phonological features exhibited at all 3 grade levels were quite similar. The frequency of usage, determined by the percentage of speakers exhibiting the feature and by the mean number of…

Language transmission occurs both in the domestic and in the public domain. These domains are typically represented by the home and the school. Viewed from the perspectives of majority-language versus minority-language speakers, language transmission becomes a very different issue. In the case of majority language speakers, language transmission…

Heritage languages (HL) are language spoken by the children of immigrants or by those who immigrated to a country when young. The purpose of this article is to briefly review what is known about heritage language development over time and to identify some gaps in people's knowledge. In this article, the authors consider three aspects: how much HL…