General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory--the component of short-term memory used for temporary…

Background: The complexity of communication presents challenges for clinical assessment, outcome measurement and intervention for people with acquired brain injury. For the purposes of assessment or treatment, this complexity is usually managed by isolating specific linguistic functions or speech acts from the interactional context. Separating…

There are challenges making connections between language use and mathematics in mathematics education. A lack of connections between the two domains can have negative consequences on student learning and performance. The challenges in statistics classrooms, where language and contexts are important as a medium of instruction, have received little…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been found to be beneficial for the development of children below three years. However, many children do not attend ECEC facilities. Frequently, structural family characteristics (SFC), such as migration background, educational attainment and income, are used to explain differing probabilities of…

As teacher educators on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, our goal is to (re)conceptualize a pedagogical approach for bilingual teacher development informed by teacher education research in the borderlands and anchored in the myriad of historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic realities of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands -- a border pedagogy.…

Positioning theory [van Langenhove and Harré (1999). Introducing positioning theory. In R. Harre, & L. van Langenhove (Eds.), "Positioning theory: Moral contexts of intentional action" (pp. 14-31). Blackwell Publishers] provides a useful analytical lens to examine how teachers' positioning in moment-to-moment interactions can expand…

Australia's much-vaunted reputation as a successful egalitarian, multicultural country has substantial merit, but it also has a chequered history, and the official narrative of egalitarianism and multiculturalism is experienced differentially by vulnerable, marginalised people and communities who bear the brunt of residual and new forms of racism…

Purpose: The aim of this article is to address some aspects of a cross-cultural interview study conducted in a PhD research project. This is done by reflecting on and discussing the influence of language and culture on the research process, as experienced by the researcher. Design/methodology/approach: The experiences have been taken from an…

How do people use objects and gestures to shape scientific argumentation? This paper engages the concept of "entanglement" as a heuristic for considering the potentials and constraints that gestures and materials create for interactants. Drawing on video recorded data from an academic-year-long linguistic ethnography of a high school…

Research in the field of language attrition suggests that the use of a foreign language (FL) diminishes among language learners when it ceases to be actively employed. The present study aimed to investigate whether similar patterns of lexical attrition occurred among FL teachers, who were generally considered to possess a strong resistance to FL…

This paper argues that learning in an unfamiliar language of learning and teaching (LoLT) negatively impacts Rwandan girls in the early years of lower secondary education. Based on classroom observation and interviews with case-study girls in four Rwandan secondary schools, we show that where girls' life circumstances differ, so too does the way…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

To date the research narrative about L2 identities has been dominated by studies on English language learning in the Anglosphere and very little existing empirical work situates the Global South as a point of departure to explore aspirations for learning languages other than English amongst international students and migrants. This article adopts…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the integration of heritage language and culture in technology-enhanced bilingual education and examine the dominance of the English language and culture in computer-assisted language learning settings. Design/methodology/approach: This research used a narrative inquiry methodology. The data came from…

This study explored attitudes toward English as a lingua franca (ELF) among in-service English teachers in Bhutan. Employing a mixed-method design, we collected data from 191 participants through surveys and interviews. The findings revealed that the majority of teachers held positive attitudes toward ELF. They identified English as a…