Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with…

This study focused on durational cues (i.e., syllable duration, pause duration, and syllable onset intervals (SOIs)) at discourse boundaries in two dialects of Mandarin, Taiwan and Mainland varieties. Speech was elicited by having 18 participants describe events in "The Pear Story" film. Recorded data were transcribed, labeled, and segmented into…

We review Brown and Kloser's article, "Conceptual continuity and the science of baseball: using informal science literacy to promote students science learning" from a Vygotskian cultural-historical and dialectic perspective. Brown and Kloser interpret interview data with student baseball players and claim that students' conceptual understanding…

The task of recognizing spoken words is notoriously difficult. Once dialectal variation is considered, the difficulty of this task increases. When living in a new dialect region, however, processing difficulties associated with dialectal variation dissipate over time. Through a series of primed lexical decision tasks (form priming, semantic…

Academic language has been referred to as a gatekeeper, something that stands in the way of academic success for native and nonnative speakers alike. In rural eastern North Carolina, many students do double the work because they speak nonstandard dialects, lack the background knowledge for school success, and thereby disengage from the classroom.…

This study examined the relationship between nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialect use and various emergent literacy skills among typically developing children in prekindergarten. Correlation and regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between children's production of NMAE forms (i.e., dialect variation [DVAR]) and their…

This article explores uninvestigated issues in Cantonese and "Hoisan-wa" language maintenance from an ethnic Chinese diaspora point of view. Data come from a larger study looking at Frog Story narratives from 140 Cantonese-English bilingual children in California. Fourteen of these children were found to display uniquely…

This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai'i to shed light on how particular languages and language varieties "style" (Auer 2007; Coupland 2007) Local/Hawaiian and mainland U.S. characters as certain kinds of people. Through an analysis of films featuring "haole" ("white, outsider") male protagonists who…

When films rich in cinematic discourse are translated, "character equivalence", the extent to which translated dialogue distorts identities in the original film, may pose a special challenge for the screen translator. This article discusses this issue in the context of "Talk to me" (Lemmons 2007), a film which showcases…

Until recently Chinese language learning in Australian primary and junior secondary schools has been characterised by programs primarily designed for second language learners who have had no prior knowledge of or exposure to Chinese language. Participation in such programs by Australian-born children who speak Putonghua (Mandarin) or another…

With the development of the English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) Teacher Resource, the educational needs and outcomes of refugee and immigrant children have been placed on the national mainstream teaching agenda. This new national resource sits alongside a plethora of other resources, known as scales and standards, which have been…

The purpose of this eight week study was to provide explicit instruction to improve spelling to 124 sixth grade students who are speakers of African American English (AAE). Two classroom teachers taught 14 different language arts class sections. The research design was a pretest/posttest/posttest design using wait-list-control. The treatment group…

The authors of this article discuss the discriminatory practices through language in both multicultural and bilingual education. Bilingual education promotes academic instruction in the native language, to varying degrees, while multicultural education stresses the need to valorize and appreciate cultural differences as a process during which…

Although the emergence of creoles presupposes naturalistic SLA, current SLA scholarship does not shed much light on the development of creoles with regard to the population-internal mechanisms that produce normalization and autonomization from the creoles' lexifiers. This is largely due to the fact that research on SLA is focused on individuals…

The Educational Decree of 1863 was an effort by Spain to reform the Philippine colonial education system. The Decree established a complete system of education in the archipelago--it required two elementary schools in each municipality (one for girls and one for boys), standardized the curriculum, and established normal schools, thus making…