This paper aims to highlight the importance of teaching sociolinguistic competence to ESL learners in Malaysian schools. Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of socio cultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence requires an understanding of the socio context in which language is used. It is proposed that carefully…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how collective conceptual reflections facilitated by online blogs can promote pre-service teachers' growth in multicultural education classes. Design/methodology/approach: Analysis of one blog is used to demonstrate how information gained through that triggered the instructor's informed…

Teachers encounter immense variety in literary competence among students in their secondary school classrooms. Yet, little is known about how they perceive and deal with this variety. Moreover, little is known about the literary development that students undergo during their school career and the different levels of development that can be…

This article reports on a longitudinal inquiry into mainland Chinese students' language learning experiences with a focus on their efforts to improve their English competence in a leading English medium University in Hong Kong. The inquiry problematizes an uncritical assumption of a shared pursuit of linguistic competence among different students…

This paper focusses on the teaching of non-linguistic subject matters in a second or third language through bilingual education. We investigate how this specific educational framework influences the development of linguistic competence as well as disciplinary knowledge. Based on a large-scale corpus of classroom interactions collected in bilingual…

The Dutch website Bereslim (http:// www.bereslim.nl) provides digital picture storybooks for three- to seven-year-olds for daily use. The present study investigates whether this new opportunity to enhance linguistic development actively assists preschool children from low- and high-educated families in an equal manner. We looked closely at the…

Constituent structure is considered to be the very foundation of linguistic competence and often considered to be innate, yet we show here that it is derivable from the domain-general processes of chunking and categorization. Using modern and diachronic corpus data, we show that the facts support a view of constituent structure as gradient (as…

The Language for Professional Communication in Accounting project has changed teaching practice in a linguistically and culturally diverse postgraduate accounting program at Macquarie University in Australia. This paper reflects on the project's interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to diversity in the classroom by tracing its growth and…

Since the publication in England of the National Languages Strategy, there has been much debate concerning the aims of primary modern foreign language (PMFL) teaching. This article presents research into the beliefs of tutors and pre-service teachers in training on Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) courses with a PMFL specialism in…

This article investigates the acquisition of the focus particle "auch" "also" by German-learning children. We report data from spontaneous and elicited production of utterances with the focus particle "auch" by 1- to 4-year-olds complementing earlier findings of a delayed production of the unaccented "auch" compared to the accented one. But in…

In the United States, the taboo against recognizing behavioral differences as a normal function of ethnic identity is strongest in the liberal social-science treatment of behavioral comparisons of blacks and whites. Of the many problems which the requirements of the classroom and the office may present for young blacks, conformity to the complex…

The argument for a pedagogy of input oriented learning for the development of speaking competence (Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury, 2004; Eslami-Rasekh, 2005) has been of increasing interest in Applied Linguistics circles. It has also been argued that multimedia applications, in particular DVDs, provide language learners with…

Background: Two broad approaches have been used to examine linguistic skills in Asperger syndrome (AS) and high functioning autism (HFA). One approach has aimed at determining the external validity of each diagnosis by investigating whether developmental language history, which differentiates AS from HFA, is relevant in long-term linguistic…

The ability to adjust language register, or style, according to listener needs was assessed in 38 high-functioning children and adolescents with ASD. Participants were asked to explain the process of going to a restaurant to a series of listeners who varied in linguistic competence. Results showed that participants with ASD spontaneously…

This paper discusses the growth of the field of psycholinguistics, what its practitioners have discovered concerning first language acquisition and the implications of these new theories and discoveries for the teaching of English. The author contends that in (English) language instruction, teachers have failed to consider what the child already…