This paper explores the implications of new patterns of migration (temporary, circular) for national and regional language policies in officially bilingual areas. Contrasting urban and rural sites in the UK (Wales), Spain (Valencia) and Switzerland (Grisons), it examines the dominant discourses regarding "national" (both in the formal…

This paper explores the dominant approach to education of ethnic minorities in Denmark. Using the concept of hegemony and the political-science distinction between monocultural and multicultural positions as approaches towards a situation of increasing linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity, the paper shows how a monocultural approach has…

This paper reports on a study that investigates how different learning methods might affect the learning process of character handwriting among beginning college learners of Chinese, as measured by tests of recognition, approximate production, precise production, and awareness of conventional stroke sequence. Two methodologies were examined during…

This study was designed to investigate the significance of developing students' critical language awareness through explicit teaching methodology of some procedures of critical discourse analysis. The researcher integrated critical activities into her teaching and students' learning process. The study was planned prudently to discover the…

Utilizing the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), this study examines teaching moments observed in free conversations by pairs of Japanese and American friends. CA's detailed turn-by-turn analysis reveals that teaching of vocabulary, idioms, and culture occurs when native speakers orient to the non-nativeness of the other speakers.…

Negotiating stance and carrying on social interaction in writing in educational contexts has been characterized by the choice of linguistic means away from explicit expressions of opinion representative of the informal relationship with the addressee towards the language that strives to conceal a subjective viewpoint and construes a formal…

The communication pattern of Initiation/Response/Follow-Up (IRF) has long been an important instructional sequence in language classrooms. When language teachers combine IRF with the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach, they create a powerful model to evaluate student oral practice and self-assess effectiveness in creating language communities…

Research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the second language (L2) classroom has revealed the potential for technology to promote learner interaction and opportunities for negotiation of meaning as well as to provide opportunities for language access outside the classroom environment. Despite this potential, social, linguistic, and…

Humorous communication is extremely complex in both its forms and functions (e.g. Norrick, 1993; 2003). Much of the previous work that has put forth suggestions for incorporating humor into the language classroom (e.g. Trachtenberg, 1979; Deneire, 1995; Schmitz, 2002) has not examined these complexities in the detail necessary for the target…

A key question in the debate on conversation analysis as an approach to SLA concerns the role of cognition in interaction and learning. Where is cognition located, and how is understanding in interaction achieved? For an empirically grounded answer, I will explore the procedural apparatus that sustains socially shared cognition. Following a brief…

In this article, I present an analysis of talk-in-interaction from an introductory Japanese as a foreign language classroom at an American university. An examination of the data revealed language play (LP) to be a highly salient feature of the participants' interactions. LP has come into increasing focus in the second language acquisition research…

The purpose of this article is to offer an interpretation of the images of Colombian English teachers constructed in official discourse, particularly (but not exclusively) in the document "Estándares básicos de competencias en lenguas extranjeras: inglés. Formar en lenguas extranjeras, el reto". This is part of a larger critical…

Essentialist representations of the Orientalised Other abound within the literature of intercultural communication. The dominant discourse constructs Chinese-speaking students as members of a homogenised collective: passive recipients of knowledge who are reliant on a reproductive approach to learning. This article seeks to offer a corrective to…

This paper adopts an automated frequency-driven approach to identify frequently-used word combinations (i.e., "lexical bundles") in academic writing. Lexical bundles retrieved from one corpus of published academic texts and two corpora of student academic writing (one L1, the other L2), were investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively.…

This paper reports some of the findings of a distinctive innovative use of audio-conferencing involving a population (campus-based advanced learners) and a type of application (task-based language learning) that have received little attention to date: the use of Wimba Voice Tools to provide additional opportunities for spoken interactions between…