The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. The majority of the Hungarian-speaking population in Slovenia lives in the bilingual ethnically mixed area of the Prekmurje region, where both Slovene and Hungarian are…

Because challenges to sustainability arise at the intersection of human and biophysical systems they are inescapably embedded in social contexts and involve multiple stakeholders with diverse and often conflicting needs and value systems. Addressing complex and solution-resistant problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and…

Language provides rich social information about its speakers. For instance, adults and children make inferences about a speaker's social identity, geographic origins, and group membership based on her language and accent. Although infants prefer speakers of familiar languages (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007), little is known about the…

The critical project the authors propose overturns the assumptions of human centrality that have underpinned much educational thought and practice, questions the ways in which the "human" and "nonhuman" are defined, and opens up new forms of engagement with the material, corporeal, and affective world. The authors ask how…

What would an educational system centered on core Hawaiian values look like? The Office of Hawaiian Education, established by the Hawai'i Department of Education (HIDOE) in 2015, has been exploring this question through a community-based process that differs significantly from typical Western approaches to policymaking. Often, policymakers use a…

What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people's actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants choose different verbs to describe the major variants of a moral dilemma, the…

This paper presents a critical examination of key concepts in the study of (signed and spoken) language and multimodality. It shows how shifts in conceptual understandings of language use, moving from bilingualism to multilingualism and (trans)languaging, have resulted in the revitalisation of the concept of language repertoires. We discuss key…

This study investigated the way in which American university students learning Arabic as a foreign language in the United States developed the ability to make and modify requests both internally, through an addition of mitigating or aggravating modality markers, and externally, via supportive moves before or after the main request in formal and…

This study explores and identifies a number of key qualitative and quantitative differences in textual discourse styles in English and Hindi editorials found in the "New York Times" ("NYT) and "Navbharat", respectively. These differences could be the source of strenuous processing of such editorials by learners of Hindi.…

Educational theorists ranging from Ivan Illich to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons have described institutionalized schooling as a modernized, secular church, full of rituals, sacraments, and various incantations. For them, the function of the teacher as priest and schooling as baptism is highly problematic, separating education from the common…

Part of helping students learn to read critically and with comprehension is guiding them to use writing to help think through the content and clarify what they understand--or don't. Looking at students' writing also helps teachers see how much learners are really understanding in their reading and where exactly any learner is struggling. After…

Although the number of English Language Learner students is increasing in the US school system, little is known about the preferences of language of instruction, particularly among young students with autism. We implemented a choice assessment with five children with autism to determine preference between English and Spanish instruction using a…

Writing in plain language aims to help users find what they need and ensures that the information is both useful and understandable. This is key for distance students whose primary library interaction may be with the library Website. A mix of user research and readability scores can be used to measure whether content is findable, useful, and…

In the United States, we tend to understand linguistic systems as separate and autonomous, and by this understanding, bilinguals are people who speak two different languages and switch between them. This understanding of bilingualism, however, does not reflect the reality of the way many bilinguals use language. Rather than "code-switch"…

This dissertation provides a formal and functional analysis of grammatical voice in Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The research addresses two primary questions, which are (1) how does Sasak clause structure and morphosyntax vary across dialects? and (2) what shapes speakers' syntactic production, namely grammatical…