This article examines teacher ideologies and multilingual practices in teaching Arabic as a heritage language in the USA. Using indexicality and its nexus to language ideologies, it identifies the key index values assigned to Standard Arabic (SA) and how these shape teacher positioning for teaching Arabic heritage. The article also analyzes the…

A growing number of studies have explored the ways how teachers contingently respond to students' unexpected responses or a lack of student responses in second language classrooms. From a sociocultural perspective, teacher contingency involves a departure from the lesson plan in local response to the unexpected or unforeseeable actions in the…

The general aim of this article is to discuss the application of Usage-Based Linguistics (UBL) to an investigation of developmental issues in second language acquisition (SLA). Particularly, the aim is to discuss the relevance for SLA of the UBL suggestion that language learning is item-based, going from formulas via low-scope patterns to fully…

In this paper we question key terms which appear frequently in discussions of language teaching and learning: "language" and "heritage". The paper draws on empirical data from one of four linked case studies in a larger project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), "Investigating Multilingualism in…

Analysis of transcripts of nine undergraduate lectures in the humanities and social sciences found that professors used asides and local breaks in topicality to increase global semantic and pragmatic unity, introduce various mutually reinforcing interpretive frames, resolve apparent contradictions, highlight contrast, and establish relevance and…

This study examines and compares the production of discourse markers by native speakers and learners of English based on a pedagogic sub-corpus from CANCODE, a corpus of spoken British English, and a corpus of interactive classroom discourse of secondary pupils in Hong Kong. The results indicate that in both groups discourse markers serve as…