Language teachers' motivation and self is essential to their long-term commitment and professional development. Drawing on Language Teacher Self theory, the study reports on the professional experiences of seven teachers teaching languages other than English (LOTEs) in a Chinese university with shifting teacher appraisal policy. The findings…

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two…

This dissertation provides a comparative analysis of Complementizer Agreement (C-agr) in modern dialects of West Germanic from a diachronic perspective, attributing the rise and development of C-agr to the initiation and progression of a Linguistic Cycle specific to C-agr. Approached as a historical process of reanalysis and compensatory renewal…

Due to the great number of Romanian pupils in Spanish public school, the local administration organises extra-curricular Romanian courses in order to preserve the Romanian language and culture. This is a way to contribute to build and consolidate a bicultural and bilingual profile of the young people. Besides, it is also an opportunity to align…

Spatial language constitutes part of the basic fabric of language. Although languages may have the same number of terms to cover a set of spatial relations, they do not always do so in the same way. Spatial languages differ across languages quite radically, thus providing a real semantic challenge for second language learners. The essay first…

Native speakers of Arabic face a number of problems in their attempt to acquire the English language. One of these problems is encountered in their attempt to use English articles. According to earlier studies, learning English articles by students whose mother-tongue is Arabic is one of the most frequent and significant difficulties Arab learners…

The author takes a retrospective look at his book "Religious Education: An Interpretive Approach," first published in 1997, and now available to readers, open access, via the European Wergeland Centre website (http://www.theewc.org/Content/Library/Research-Development/Literature/Introducing-Religious-Education-an-Interpretive-Approach).…

Drawing on the findings of longitudinal studies in uninstructed contexts over the last two decades, this synthesis explores variations in developmental patterns across second language (L2) pragmatic features. Two synthesis questions were addressed: (a) What are the variations in developmental patterns across pragmatic features?, and (b) What are…

Translingual dispositions, characterized by a general openness to plurality and difference in the ways people use language, are central for all users of English in a globalized society, and the fostering of such proclivities is an imperative to the contemporary composition classroom. In this article, we analyze student writing that emerged from a…

Analyzing the rate at which languages change can clarify whether similarities across languages are solely the result of cognitive biases or might be partially due to descent from a common ancestor. To demonstrate this approach, we use a simple model of language evolution to mathematically determine how long it should take for the distribution over…

Approaches to the concept of culture and teaching cultural competence in a foreign language classroom have been changing over the last decades. The paper summarises, compares, contrasts and evaluates four major approaches to teaching cultural competence in foreign language teaching, that is, knowledge-based approach, contrastive approach,…

This paper relates most closely to David Raffe's writing on "policy borrowing" across countries and across time and his illumination for policy purposes of transition concepts such as "pathways". The discussion makes the point that concepts can both illuminate empirical reality as well as distort it. The paper then moves on to…

This study reports the findings of a research that was conducted on ten (10) Arab students, who were enrolled in a master of English applied linguistics program at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The research aimed at instrumentally analyzing the English stops produced by Arab learners, in terms of voice onset time (VOT); identifying the effect of…

In times of crisis when literature and world languages are threatened by economic hardship, they should draw closer to African diaspora studies. The African diaspora is so vast, longstanding, and diverse that it must be studied using a comparative, multilingual, interdisciplinary, and international approach that includes study in French,…

Recently, attention in modern linguistic theory has been shifted to facilitating a broader understanding of the world, in which language is a tool to establish a bridge between the interlocutor and the recipient. To do so, the development of linguistic, communicative and sociopragmatic competences enriched with socio-cultural inputs in English as…