Syntactic priming studies in second language (L2) have contributed to understanding how L2 speakers' syntactic knowledge is represented and processed. However, little is known about social influences on L2 speakers' syntactic processing and learning. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers' syntactic priming is influenced by social…

This study examined the use of non-standard English features in 16-year-old students' writing in the UK. Adopting a diachronic approach to the investigation of students' written production, the study sought to identify changes in students' use of non-standard English over the course of a decade, specifically from 2004 to 2014. It involved an…

In this study, we explore how Aboriginal multilingual speakers use technology-enhanced environments, specifically Facebook, for their translanguaging practices. Using data collected from Facebook posts written by seven Aboriginal youth over a period of 18 months, we investigate how the participants move between Aboriginal English (AE) and Standard…

This article presents the findings of a study of English-Spanish mediation in hospital and court settings in the USA. The study is based on two main issues: the linguistic and cultural diversity of Hispanics, and the specialized nature of the health and judicial systems. When encountering new or different health care and judicial systems in the…

The prepositional phrases used in free play discourse by 45 African American preschoolers from low-income homes were analyzed. A statistically significant positive relationship was found between amounts of African American English (AAE) form use and relational semantic complexity. No significant relationships were found between simpler…

Responds to an article by S. Alan Cohen on oral language deficiency and its relation to reading failure, and concludes that reading achievement and reading failure are largely determined by cognitive and communicative strategies that may be socialized differently in diverse social and ethnic groups. (JM)

Recent studies suggest that the language deficiency often attributed to disadvantaged children, especially disadvantaged black children, is not a language deficit so much as a difficulty in dialect switching. The disadvantaged child's language patterns are different from the language patterns of the child from the mainstream of American society. A…

This study examines the usage of the auxiliaries "avoir" and "etre" in the passe compose and pluperfect. The study is primarily based on a sample of French written by agroup of grade 9 Franco-Ontarian pupils from the Sudbury region. The students' written French is shown to include a high proportion of cases where intransitive…

This study examines the usage of preposition "pour" in the written and spoken French of two groups of Grade 9 and 12 Franco-Ontarian bilingual students from Welland and from the Sudbury area. Both the students' written and spoken French are shown to include a substantial proportion of constructions with "pour" which deviate…

This collection of five papers from the Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English deals with language standards, common attitudes toward language, the relationship between linguistics and the teaching of English, and the linguistic component of the preparation of the English teacher. Albert H. Marckwardt surveys the history of language…

This study examines the hypothesis that the French used by a large number of Franco-Ontarians represents a linguistic system (or several systems) that differs from Standard French. In addition, a review of previous research leads to the inverse hypothesis, that Ontarian French represents a body of different systems or sub-systems that are more or…