Various studies have shown that bilingual children score lower than their monolingual peers on standardized receptive vocabulary tests. This study investigates if this effect is moderated by language distance. Dutch receptive vocabulary was tested with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The impact of cross-language distance was examined…

In literature, "Baskeet," also known by the Amharic term, "Basketo," is an Omotic language spoken by about 80,000 speakers in the Basketo Special Woreda and in the Melokoza Woreda of the Gamo-Gofa Zone in the Southern Region of Ethiopia. Baskeet (ISO 639-3 code: bst) belongs to the Ometo branch of North Omotic and is hitherto…

Twiza is a tricky word to translate from its original Berber. In its simplest meaning, Twiza speaks to the collective effort of a community to support each other. To speak of Twiza is to call forth, then, the collective material practices which enact the values of a civil society. As Edward Said highlighted decades ago however, when terms (or…

Recent studies on language learning motivation have foregrounded notions of identity formation and self-fulfilment. This paper takes two different theoretical frameworks as points of departure (Dörnyei's 'L2 Motivational Self System' and Kramsch's 'desire in language'), but it looks at the motivation/desire of the parents of young language…

The field of heritage language (HL) education is a rapidly growing area of educational linguistics research and pedagogy. While considerable research has looked at identity in relation to HL learning in adolescents and adults, this article focuses on the identities and language attitudes of young HL learners of Arabic and Somali at an elementary…

Getting a student's name right is the first step in welcoming him or her to school. Staff members who work with student-level data also know the importance of accurately and consistently recording a student's name in order to track student data over time, to match files across data sets, and to make meaning from the data. For students whose home…

The use of computing technologies in less commonly taught language (LCTL) and endangered language (EL) learning is different from mainstream computer-assisted language learning (CALL), where several languages, most noticeably English, dominate the literature. Many most commonly taught language (MCTL) learners learn a language for a variety of…

This study investigates if participation in mother tongue instruction (henceforth MTI) impacts the biliteracy proficiency of young bilinguals, drawing on examples from Somali-Swedish bilinguals and Somali MTI in a Swedish school context. In the study, biliteracy was operationalized as reading proficiency and vocabulary knowledge in two languages,…

This study describes the thematic roles of Somali; a language that manifests unorthodox grammatical structures due to the use of the focus particle. A mapping of some language features related to the semantic-syntactic interface is carried out. The effect of the meaning of the lexical items is tested to whether it affects the syntactic structures…

English learners (ELs) are students whose primary language is not English and are eligible for English language development services through the Transitional Bilingual Instruction Program (TBIP). Washington state's TBIP has existed since the passage of Senate Bill 2149 in 1979, and is codified in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) Chapter…

This article presents a qualitative study of how the individual roles and ideologies of four Arabic and Somali bilingual classroom assistants at an elementary school in Sweden both mirror and challenge larger discourses about language, education and social integration. Data were analyzed using the theoretical constructs of positioning and reveal…

This study explored individual variability in the bilingual vocabularies of 65 Maltese children aged 23-27 months (N = 33) and 30-34 months (N = 32). Most of the participants' direct input consisted of Maltese sentences embedding English words. Bilingualism was present at the societal level. Word production was measured through parental report,…

English learners (ELs) are students whose primary language is not English and are eligible for English language development services through the Transitional Bilingual Instruction Program (TBIP). Washington state's TBIP has existed since the passage of Senate Bill 2149 in 1979, and is codified in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) Chapter…

Nigeria is a country with over 520 different languages, the multitude nature of languages is making instructions so difficult in Schools, particularly in North-Central Nigeria where they have students with different language background attending the same school. The difficulty of smooth teaching in this kind of situation is leading to attrition…

This article posits that "passing" is a manipulation of ambiguously embodied characteristics, linguistic practice, and ratification by other speakers. I explore discourses and practices of "passing" by post-migrant generation, diasporically-resident Moroccans who seek to be unmarked by migration when bargaining in Moroccan…