Responding relevantly to an information-soliciting utterance (ISU) is required of a school-age child many times daily. For the child with pragmatic language difficulties, this may be especially problematic, yet clinicians have had few data to design intervention for improving these skills. This small-scale study looks at the ability of a child…

Christian missionaries have played a crucial role not only in assisting past and current forms of colonialism and neocolonialism, not only in attacking and destroying other ways of being, but also in terms of the language effects their projects have engendered. The choices missionaries have made to use local or European languages have been far…

Presents a study showing that New Zealanders have very different attitudes to variants that sociolinguists have lumped together in the past suggests that globalization with localization is an important principle for variationists to take into account. (Author/VWL)

There are different ways of exploring and examining the visual medium in the service and disservice of education. A discursive form rather than a visual medium is chosen in this attempt. Utilizing the conceptualizations of Suzanne Langer, Christine Nystrom observed that American symbolic environments have undergone a massive shift from discursive…

For over 40 years, sociolinguists have been demonstrating that all varieties of language are equal in linguistic terms. Yet vernacular varieties such as African American English and Hawai'i Creole are still generally marginalized and excluded from the educational process, with the result that speakers of these varieties are disadvantaged in…

This paper examines the transmission patterns of Eastern Brittany's Romance language variety, Gallo, based on quantitative data showing learning patterns of school pupils of the language and their parents in 2003 and 2004. Results confirm the sharp decline in Gallo transmission between generations. Nevertheless, Gallo transmission has not…

The present ethnographic case study investigates how the identities of immigrant minority pupils are constructed in a multicultural classroom in a Flemish primary school. From the analysis of the class teacher's discourse, it emerges that both Flemish native pupils' identities and those of immigrant minority pupils are constructed as homogeneous:…

The international use of English as a lingua franca (ELF)--i.e. between non-native speakers of different nationalities, in situations where no native English speakers are present--has become an important feature of business, diplomacy, education, and personal relationships around the world. Nowhere is this more true than in Northeast Asia, where…

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

Formal language use in online communication and phone messages is increasingly being replaced by a new age language, i.e. the net lingos commonly used in Internet acronyms and text messages. This is, perhaps, a logical consequence of computers, mobile phones and gadgets becoming familiar household items in an era where there is a constant demand…

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research…

Much of curriculum innovation in English language teaching in the context of former colonial countries has been derivative rather than generative, imitative rather than self-initiated or self-regulatory. This trend is in part the result of historical exigencies that made the importation of ELT approaches, methods, and techniques for classroom…

The article explores the transition from the linguistic imperialism of the colonial and postcolonial ages to the increasingly dominant role of English as a neoimperial language. It analyzes "global" English as a key dimension of the U.S. empire. U.S. expansionism is a fundamental principle of the foreign policy of the United States that can be…

This study investigated the intelligibility of Chinese graduate students to their Indian, Chinese, Korean, and American peers. Specifically, the researcher sought to determine the teaching priorities for English for Academic Purposes in the US, where listeners have a wide variety of native languages. Research on Second Language Acquisition…