Maritime Sign Language (MSL) emerged in the easternmost provinces in Canada with origins traced as far back as to the Weald, a region in Southeastern England. Therefore, British sign language is a root language that led to the creation of MSL. This type of language emersion is known as a Deaf community sign language, which occurs when Deaf people…

In the decades since the formal end of colonialism in Africa, classrooms have become a crucial space where students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, agency, and self-determination. One key area in which this struggle has been engaged is the role of language in education and whether it can be a tool for both academic discourses and…

This phenomenological study explores the experiences of machine translation (MT) use among Chinese undergraduates in a Chinese-foreign, English medium instruction (EMI), joint degree program in southern China. Advancements in MT technology have raised questions about its application in academic settings, particularly in foreign and second language…

Research on translanguaging and humanizing pedagogy has primarily focused on English-as-a-second-language (ESL) contexts, while little attention has been given to the examination and these practices in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) settings. This qualitative case study aims to address this gap by employing empirical evidence from various…

Translanguaging research among multilingual students has received considerable attention across different contexts of practice. The most robust contexts in translanguaging research have been the classroom contexts between teacher and students. This study examined the affordances of translanguaging spaces "between class sessions" in…

This qualitative study examined four Belizean primary teachers' multilingual pedagogies in language arts instruction. The research question, what multilingual pedagogies did Belizean primary teachers use in the Language Arts classrooms guides this multiple case study. Using a thematic analysis in the data analysis process results in the…

Dual language (DL) education has been regarded as a means toward equity and social justice for linguistic minorities. Several studies, however, question if DL programs can, in fact, overcome inequities in the education of emergent bilinguals. This ethnographic study followed these inquiries and explored how translanguaging theory and pedagogy…

This dissertation examines the linguistic behavior of code-switching in three groups of highly proficient Cantonese-English bilinguals. Code-switching refers to alternating between two or more languages within the same sentence or between two sentences. While traditional research on bilingualism often compares bilingual speakers against…

The role of the learner's mother tongue in second and foreign language classrooms has been a subject of debate for many decades (Brice, Mastin, & Perkins, 1998; Cook, 2001; Ferguson, 2003; Almulhim, 2014; Al-Amir, 2017). This debate about the use of the learner's first language is reflected in the absence of a clear policy on its use within…

This study explores the relationship between language selection and identity construction in contemporary Indonesia through an examination of the function of English, a language that still receives stigma from many Indonesians and the government, particularly in Indonesian popular texts published after 1998. Utilizing hybrid critical approaches…

This sociolinguistic study examines the functions and motivations of code-switching, which is used here to mean the use of more than one language in the same conversation. The conversations studied here take place in a very particular context: one-on-one speaking sessions in a study abroad program in Morocco where English is the L1 and Arabic the…

This dissertation explores Bai language use in Jianchuan County, China. On the basis of interviews with 42 language users, transcripts of spontaneous conversation and elicited narratives, excerpts from Bai texts in an alphabetic orthography and Chinese characters, and six months of participant observation, I demonstrate how language users'…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, the rapid liberalization and democratization of Taiwan has led to the transformation of its political structure from a single-party system to a full-fledged two-party system. Along with this political opposition are the two contrastive concepts, the North and the South. Located in this background, this…

From incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1828, through the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 governmental language policies and other socio/political forces influenced the Turkic population of the Republic of Azerbaijan to speak Russian. Even with changes since independence Russian use--including various kinds of code-switching and…