Many minority students enter the university without the discursive ''codes of power" that they need both to find academic success and to self-identify as scholars. High schools and college preparatory programs too often ignore the role that academic language and literacy play in success at the college level. Even when academic…

The purpose of this study was to understand how African American college men construct masculine and ethnic notions of their identities, despite disproportionate social obstacles and hegemonic stereotypes. The primary research question of this study was, "how might African American undergraduate males understand and develop healthy concepts…

Bilinguals must focus their attention to control competing languages. In bilingual aphasia, damage to the fronto-subcortical loop may lead to pathological language switching and mixing and the attrition of the more automatic language (usually L1). We present the case of JZ, a bilingual Basque-Spanish 53-year-old man who, after haematoma in the…

The study examined the use of code-switching by English and science teachers in secondary schools in Malaysia. It focuses on the functions of code-switching in multilingual classrooms where English is the language of instruction, examining in particular the reiterative function of code-switching and its association with translation. Thirty six…

Problems continue to pervade the educational experiences of many minority students, especially Latinos. Through a sociocultural framework, this ethnographic study closely examines the experiences of a Puerto Rican family at home and in an English-dominant school. The study focuses on the school experiences of the family's kindergarten son. The…

In this commentary, I review Kellogg's comments on a recent editorial in the journal "Mind, Culture, and Activity" (Roth, 2008). Concerning Kellogg's code-switching model for learning language, I present and exemplify a dialectic problem of multi/cultural literacy: the first articulation that crosses the boundaries of cultures and languages…

The definition of English language learners needs to be broadened to include the marginalized dialects of English. Not all native speakers speak Standard English, and even those who do need to learn Academic English to succeed in school. By using strategies developed for ELLs, teachers can help all students become fluent in the language of school.

This article uses multiple theoretical perspectives to understand the synergy that occurs between linguistically diverse parents and children during reading interactions. Through the detailed analysis of code-switching during book-sharing activities in a middle-class, bilingual home, we can observe how linguistically diverse parents support the…

The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue for three types of modifications to the current models of the bilingual lexicon. The first modification involves word categories: I will show that emotion words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, represented and…

Efforts to improve educational outcomes for English learners often focus on "academic language," but unfortunately the field lacks a clear, agreed-upon definition of the concept. This article reports on a design research study that focused on students' engagement in one academic practice over several months: reading and discussing…

Embracing the dynamic nature of English language can help students learn more about all forms of English. To fully engage students, teachers should not adhere to an anachronistic and static view of English. Instead, they must acknowledge, accept, and even use different language forms within the classroom to make that classroom dynamic, inclusive,…

During 2012/13, academics from the Department of Education, University of Oxford were commissioned by CfBT to conduct an independent evaluation of the CfBT Brunei English teaching programme. This report describes the main findings from a research project that studied the role of CfBT Education Trust in supporting improved English language teaching…

Analysis of Spanish and English speech in a new immigrant community of Latinos in Georgia, USA, shows that Spanish and English pattern differently. There is a higher frequency of Spanish sentences containing English words than English sentences containing Spanish words. But the reverse is true of grammatical influence without mixing words. There…

The ability to vary language style or register is important for successfully navigating social situations. For example, we speak differently to our boss than we do to our children. This project examined whether high-functioning speakers with ASD were able to vary the language used for requests along continua of "politeness/bossiness", whether any…

This study reports two metalinguistic parameters that constitute the schematic control of lateral inhibitory links between translation equivalents within the bilingual lexico-semantic system of Green's ("Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 1:67-81, 1998a, "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" 1:100-104, 1998b, "The…