The majority of university students in the United Arab Emirates are English language learners. As a country that has only recently established its educational system based on an American model, it has adopted English as its language for teaching and learning. Challenges related to the use of a second language have been noted and simple…

Making sense of theory plays an essential role in the life of a doctoral student. This autoethnographic study explores how I made sense of educational theory while conceptualizing the theoretical framework for my PhD proposal. A diary that I kept while designing the proposal serves as the data source to examine how my thinking about theory…

Religious poetry is, a heightened and impregnated form of expression. There is a marriage of form and sense. Linguistically speaking, religious poetry has a conceptual interface between syntax and semantics; a strong relationship between language and thought; universality and cultural specificity; the discourse context and the psychological…

The paper presents findings of primary school children's performance on classification and generalisation tasks to demonstrate the fundamental connection between their verbal thinking processes and problem-solving, on the one hand, and the practical activities of their society and culture, on the other. The results reveal that, although children…

Building up messages as a cognitive activity within the linguistic multi-level system is the result of the interaction between the various components of this system. Yet, this interactive process occurring in the language user's mind while encoding can vary from person to person. Likewise, it also differs in different recipients while decoding.…

This study uses Lansdown's approach to Vygotsky's theory of language and concept development as the basis for comparing the conceptual level Ghanaian children express in their native languages (Ga or Twi) and in their school language (English). (Editor)

Samples of secondary school students in Tanzania were administered repertory tests with elements consisting of either persons or countries in both of the languages English and Swahili. Comparison of English and Swahili grids showed that language deficit reduces the polarization of judgements made using constructs articulated in the weaker…

Techniques developed to address the reading problems of an adult English as a second language (ESL) class are described. An intensive English course was developed for a group of Arabic-speaking vocational education administrators who had several years of English training. However, they performed poorly on the lowest level of a reading series.…

Discusses problems of learning English by students from Papua New Guinea, suggesting teachers restructure accepted assumptions about teaching and learning in English to more appropriately meet needs of students from different cultures. Argues many of these language problems are associated with lack of equivalence between concepts of academic…

A semantic-relatedness test and a cloze-type/sentence-completion test compared meanings ascribed to spatial prepositions by adult native English and advanced English-as-a-second-language speakers. Non-native speakers differed from native speakers in the semantic boundaries ascribed to the words, with the differences deriving from weighting…