This article explores material-semiotic movements of literacy and the collective potentials of an estranged relationship to language in early childhood bilingual education. It engages three different situations from a bilingual, Spanish-Swedish early childhood institution in Sweden with notions of a minor literature, as it appears in Deleuze and…

Background: Validity is a notable concept in language testing which has concerned many researchers and scholars in the field of language testing due to its importance in decision making process. Tests' results always introduce consequences to test takers' lives which emphasizes the need to ensure their validity. Detecting and delineating the…

Challenging the notion that English-medium instruction (EMI) is necessarily an English-only space, the authors argue for an alternative vision of EMI settings as spaces that benefit both emergent bi/multilinguals and their English-monolingual peers. Given that the enactment of EMI varies according to the underlying language ideologies of the…

The study presented here, theoretically framed at the crossroads of sociocultural and decolonial perspectives, draws attention to the sudden proliferation of two specific neologisms in the area of language, education and identity across time and space. It particularly highlights concerns regarding the ways in which these are deployed within…

Informal language learning in online communities represents a growing area of interest. In part, this interest is due to the potential for meaningful second language (L2) communication, rather than the "learning about language" argued to be prevalent in L2 classrooms (Thorne, Black, & Sykes, 2009, p. 804). This study reports on a…

This study focuses on the systematic avoidance of difficult expressions by learners of English to achieve error-free production. It is an attempt to reveal why this strategy is being so widely used and its negative effects on the overall L2 development. The frequency of relative clauses used by thirty-six B2 level undergraduate students in their…

The increasing placement of English learners (ELs) in mainstream classrooms in conjunction with scant attention given to teaching these students in preservice education and professional development suggests a need to better understand how mainstream teachers understand their professional identities as teachers of these students. The purpose of…

In L2 (second language) pedagogy, texts are commonly distinguished based on whether language instruction was a consideration in their creation. Texts that are not created for L2 instruction, or "authentic texts," have been thought to represent the target language in an accurate and reliable way (Zyzik and Polio 2017). Conversely, texts…

In this study, we present an educational board game designed to promote both mathematics and Chinese language learning. We use text-mining techniques to analyze dialog by 40 students, in six groups playing a board game in a dual language immersion context. Our findings provide evidence to support past claims and arguments that play and…

As a compulsory classroom subject in an environment in which it is rarely used, English as a foreign language might seem to have very little connection to students' present or future lives. There may be a disconnect between various circulating messages about English, and experiences of little day-to-day English use. This article presents…

Digital technology has great potential for second language (L2) pragmatics learning as it creates communicative contexts for learners to practice L2s. However, despite the growing interest in technology enhanced learning, the efficacy of using technology on L2 pragmatics remains unknown. This paper examines the role of technology in L2 pragmatics…

This article proposes basic (shared) and extended (nonshared) language cognition in native speakers as a function of two types of extralinguistic attributes: (a) degree of being multilingual and (b) variables related to amount and type of literacy experiences (e.g., level of education). This approach may throw new light on the question of whether…

This article presents an investigation of L2 pragmatic development by a group of 19 Chinese EFL teachers who participated in a five-month program in Canada (SA group). A written discourse-completion task (WDCT) was administered to assess participants' pragmatic knowledge of how to make requests in English. They also completed a paper-based…

In the multilingual environments of Africa, national literacy policies vary in terms of the attention they give to the roles and purposes of local, national and international languages. In the context of the global Sustainable Development Agenda, the instrumental purpose of literacy is often assumed, if not explicitly spelled out. At community…

Although researchers in the area of second language acquisition agree on the effectiveness of form-focused instruction, there is little consensus on the appropriate time to direct learners' attention to linguistic items, that is, whether before or after the error occurrence [Nassaji, H. 2010, "The Occurrence and Effectiveness of Spontaneous…