Recent migration combined with strategies to diversify the teacher workforce has led to complexities in teacher diversity identified by the term 'superdiversity' (Vertovec, 2006). This article builds on recent work on the processes of convergence and superdiversity (Wessendorf, 2011) by focusing on meaningful encounters in the mathematics…

Researchers consistently find a correlation between low literacy levels and high school dropout rates, expulsion, reading achievement, and failing grades for African American males. Low literacy achievement in African American males may result from multiple factors, including dialectic linguistic differences and/or phonological awareness…

This paper focuses on the particular kinds of difficulties which arise in the study of an emergent tone-system, exemplified by Tamang in Nepal, where pitch, phonation and other laryngeal features combine in the definition of a tone. As a consequence, conducting a well-ordered analysis in stages first of phonetic transcription, then variation in…

The paper assesses the contribution of standardisation towards language death taking Clement Doke's resolutions on the various Shona dialects as a case study. It is a qualitative analysis of views gathered from speakers of the language situated in various provinces of Zimbabwe, the country in which the language is spoken by around 75% of the…

The importance of secondary-stressed (SS) and unstressed-unreduced (UU) syllable accuracy for spoken word recognition in English is as yet unclear. An acoustic study first investigated Russian learners' of English production of SS and UU syllables. Significant vowel quality and duration reductions in Russian-spoken SS and UU vowels were found,…

This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation--when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk--into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair…

This study examines heritage speakers' knowledge of Standard Arabic (SA) and compares their patterns of SA acquisition to those of learners of SA as second/foreign language (L2). In addition, the study examines the influence of previously acquired language varieties, including Colloquial Arabic (QA), on SA acquisition. To this end, the study…

This article attempts to address the need for African American students to receive the same level of support that most schools in Texas provide for English language learners due to the underperformance of many African American students on various literacy measures. The intent is to provide readers with the phonological and grammatical features of…

Through the analysis of survey and interview data, we investigated the attitudes and perceptions of 32 multilingual teachers of Spanish in Belize, a code-switching (CS) context where Spanish is in intense contact with English and Belizean Kriol. More specifically, we examined teachers' and students' attitudes toward Spanish and CS and teachers'…

A critical function of schooling is to provide young writers with opportunities to explore real-life, out-of-school experiences through writing. However, literacy instruction in U.S. schools primarily (and sometimes almost exclusively) focuses on the tested skills, with little recognition of children's diverse backgrounds and experiences. The…

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard,…

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a motor speech disorder in which changes to segmental as well as suprasegmental aspects lead to the perception of a foreign accent in speech. This paper focuses on one suprasegmental aspect, namely that of intonation. It provides an in-depth analysis of the intonation system of four speakers with FAS with the aim…

Many African American children make use of African American English (AAE) in their everyday lives, and face academic barriers when introduced to Standard American English (SAE) in the classroom. Research has shown that students who can adapt and use SAE for academic purposes demonstrate significantly better test scores than their less adaptable…

Purpose: To examine the production of plural morphology in children acquiring a dialect of Spanish with syllable-final /s/ lenition with the goal of comparing how plural marker omissions in the speech of these children compare with plural marker omissions in children with language impairment acquiring other varieties of Spanish. Method: Three…