Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a curriculum supplement designed to enhance awareness of Mainstream American English (MAE) in African American English- (AAE-) speaking prekindergarten children. Method: Children in 2 Head Start classrooms participated in the study. The experimental classroom received the Talking…

This paper aims at investigating the negative particles and morphemes in three main Jordanian dialects (Urban, Rural and Bedouin). This quantitative and qualitative study includes 30 teachers from different disciplines who use these dialects. The sample of the study was selected randomly. The research used two research instruments, a checklist and…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of second language (L2) experience--operationalized as length of residence (LOR) in Canada--on late Japanese learners of English. Data collected from 65 participants consisted of three groups of learners (short-, mid-, and long-LOR groups) and two baseline groups of native Japanese and native…

This paper presents children's writing in their vernacular family language, Moroccan Arabic. It first provides some background to the family and school literacies of nine-year-old children of Moroccan Arabic (MA) background growing up in France with French literacy practices at school and Written Arabic literacy practices in the home. The paper…

Chinese tones are associated with a syllable to convey meaning, English pitch accents are prominence markers associated with stressed syllables. As both are created by pitch modulation, their pitch contours can be quite similar. The experiment reported here examines whether native speakers of Chinese produce, when speaking English, the Chinese…

This paper explores the issue of metalanguage and writing instruction in the senior secondary curriculum. It reports on the use of a design based research collaboration between a very experienced teacher of Ancient History and a research team with the aim of improving literacy outcomes for a group of disadvantaged students. The case highlights…

This study investigates how the attitudes of 60 Korean university students towards five varieties of English are affected by the identification of the speaker's nationality and ethnicity. The study employed both a verbal guise technique and questions eliciting overt beliefs and preferences related to learning English. While the majority of the…

The aim of this paper is to explore the phonetic nature of vowels in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Although Arabic is a Semitic language, the speech sound system of Arabic is very comprehensive. Data used for this study were elicited from the standard speech of nine informants who are native speakers of Arabic. The researchers used themselves as…

This article examines the work of Geneva Smitherman, its contribution to the development of composition studies, and its relation to recent scholarship on translingualism and code-meshing. Analyzing her prodigious output in relation to these contemporary studies of language diversity and writing instruction, the article considers Smitherman's…

It is the purpose of this paper to describe how the identification of linguistic differences in Black English helped eradicate the language barrier in a rural Georgia classroom and enhanced the communication between the teacher and the students.

This paper reports on a study that investigated the perceptions of a group of bilingual speakers of English and Chinese in Hong Kong concerning issues surrounding accent, identity and English as a lingua franca (ELF). Data were primarily collected via in-depth interviews with 28 university students in Hong Kong who are also regular users of…

Qian and Schedl's Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Test was administered to 31 native-speaker undergraduates under an "unconstrained" condition, in which the number of responses to headwords was unfixed, whereas a corresponding group ("n" = 36) completed the test under the original "constrained" condition. Results…

In light of the current assaults on Black girls and misaligned instructional practices in and outside of schools across the nation, English educators need to understand a more complete vision of the identities girls create for themselves, and the literacies and practices needed to best teach them. This article provides a review of literature of…

This symposium, "Barack Obama's Significance for Rhetoric and Composition," aims to provoke and renew disciplinary conversations about the meaning of an age now nearly past, as well as to pose questions that resonate for presidential rhetoric generally. It includes: (1) "Obama's Rhetoric: Black Talk Flow, White Folk Fluent"…

This paper includes two interrelated studies. The first production study investigates the timing patterns of English as spoken by Chinese learners with different dialect backgrounds. The second comprehension study explores native and non-native speakers' assessments of the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English, and examines the effects of…