Two social roles for language have been distinguished by Edwards--the communicative and the symbolic. Using data from a survey of public attitudes to Gaelic in Scotland, the article investigates the extent to which people's view of language may be characterised as relating to these roles. Respondents were grouped, using statistical cluster…

Pinyin is a sound-annotating system for Chinese characters using Roman letters. Teaching and learning Pinyin has been an important educational practice in Mainland China for native Chinese children, and it is also typically taught to beginning learners of Chinese as a foreign/second language in tertiary-level classrooms. However, whether it should…

Taiwanese international students are among 1 of the top 10 international populations on American campuses; thus, more research is needed to address the particular issues related to their transition process. This is among the first studies to empirically test the cross-national cultural competence model as a conceptual framework by examining…

The present qualitative study sought to explore the relationship between English language learning and identity reconstruction from the viewpoints of Iranian language learners. The data were collected by means of focus-group interviews with forty-five male intermediate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). To define the concept of…

This study explores the experiences of a culturally and linguistically diverse group of immigrant adult students as they attended a 12-week employment preparation course for newcomers to Canada. The main aim of the course was to equip the immigrants with knowledge and skills, including English for employment purposes, which are necessary to be…

There has been a widespread concern in China about language education that while much emphasis has been put on English and English education, Chinese language and culture seem to have been neglected. Debates have arisen over what role English should play in China's education, as well as how the role of English is related to Chinese language and…

Although standard language ideologies have been well researched and theorized, the practices that lead to the reproduction and enactment of these ideologies deserve attention. Specifically, there remains a need to study language that both reveals reliance on standard language ideologies and perpetuates these ideologies within the field of writing…

Increasingly, there is a growing move towards using global languages such as English as media of instruction. Does one swim against this growing tide or does one look at strategies to accommodate English in multilingual contexts such as prevail in South Africa? In this article I examine the debates in South Africa about the role of English in…

This critical review of literature provides a detailed description of foreigner talk as a simplified register and critically discusses findings entrenched in studies done about this SLA issue. The studies cited are classified as researches concerning foreigner talk that occurs in both natural and classroom settings. Based on the critical review,…

This paper is meant to illuminate the possibility of how world Englishes within an international setting could become similar to the confusion encountered in the Bible record of the Tower of Babel. Presented here is the trend of world Englishes as a part of an English as an international language paradigm. The discussion then proceeds to address…

The rise of English as a global lingua franca and the increasing use of it into the multilingual and multicultural contexts appear to be further indexing a number of new issues. These issues include from the discussion of its ownership -- that it is no longer only the language of native speakers of it, as statistically non-native speakers make up…

Most of the projects aimed at making migrants more successful in the context of higher education in Germany focus on programmes that introduce the rules and expectations of the university to students and try to change their habitus. This article discusses a multilingualism project conducted in a German university that strives to go beyond this…

Very little research has been conducted on the effects of CLIL on L1 competence development. This article compares CLIL and non-CLIL learners' levels of attainment in Spanish Language and Literature in seven public schools in the South of Spain. Learners' verbal intelligence and motivation were previously matched in order to homogenise the sample.…

This chapter discusses issues and challenges encountered in using large-scale data sets to study educational experiences and subsequent outcomes for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students. In this chapter, we argue that the linguistic and cultural diversity of Native peoples, coupled with the legal and political ways in which education…

The social and cultural "turn" in language education of recent years has helped move language teaching and curriculum design away from many of the more rigid dogmas of earlier generations, but the issue of the roles of the learners' first language (L1) in language pedagogy and classroom interaction is far from settled. Some follow a…