This article reports on a survey with 170 school-age children growing up with two or more languages in the Canadian province of Ontario where English is the majority language, French is a minority language, and numerous other minority languages may be spoken by immigrant or Indigenous residents. Within this context the study focuses on minority…

During the Soviet era, the Kazakh language underwent harsh times and was on the brink of extinction from urban areas in Kazakhstan. Today, the country is paving its way towards reviving the language. This article details an effort to support Kazakh language learning in motivating secondary school students through the use of technology. Through the…

The study of language contact epitomizes the dynamics of language as a system of human communication. The competing linguistic forces at work when speakers of different language varieties come into contact can be narrowed down to two basic concepts--convergence and divergence. Looking at linguistic areas using a macro approach, languages in…

This article reports the results of a school-based curriculum development project that aimed to support language teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse student populations in Norway to develop teaching strategies that foster intercultural citizenship and multilingual competence. Three university researchers collaborated with…

Sign Language Peoples (SLPs) across the world have developed their own languages and visuo-gestural-tactile cultures embodying their collective sense of Deafhood (Ladd 2003). Despite this, most nation-states treat their respective SLPs as disabled individuals, favoring disability benefits, cochlear implants, and mainstream education over language…

Although it is commonly thought that people who are bilingual have an advantage in the labor market, studies on this topic have not borne out this perception.The literature, in fact, has found an earnings penalty is associated with bilingualism--people who are bilingual often make less than people who are monolingual in similar jobs. This report…

Many in the field of language policy have called for studies that connect policy texts at the macro level with their interpretations in districts, schools, and classrooms at the micro level. The purpose of this study is to trace Washington's educational language policy through the layers of interpretation to educational practice to see how the…

In large-scale assessment studies, language minority students typically obtain lower test scores in mathematics than native speakers. Although this performance difference was related to the linguistic complexity of test items in some studies, other studies did not find linguistically demanding math items to be disproportionally more difficult for…

This paper describes the results from a qualitative study of 72 preservice teachers' initial ideas about contextualizing science instruction with language minority students. Participants drew primarily on local ecological and multicultural contexts as resources for contextualizing instruction. However, preservice teachers enrolled in the bilingual…

The sociolinguistic context of Irish, a minority language which is also the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, presents a multitude of issues for consideration in relation to Irish language teaching and learning. This article reports a small-scale (n?=?12) exploratory qualitative study of the range of motivations to be observed…

While the majority of people in Ireland speak English as a first language, the minority Irish language is spoken daily by approximately 3% of the population even though is a compulsory subject in Irish schools. Recent research has shown the language to be in crisis, with consistently declining standards of attainment in schools. This paper…

Parent involvement has been shown to be one of the keys to student educational success, their ability to perform at a high level and persevere. The latest government statistics reveal that 53 million Hispanics now reside in the United States and 75 % of this population speaks Spanish at home [Cooper, M. (2014). "Hispanics in America and in…

English learners and students with disabilities both need educational supports to succeed in school. However, the kinds of support these two groups of students need may be different, and not receiving appropriate supports may have negative consequences on student learning (Callahan, 2013; Scott, Boynton Hauerwas, and Brown, 2014). To provide…

In Kenya, the only official document that deals with the use of mother tongue (MT) in Schools is the 1967 Gachathi report. The report has clear-cut guidance and policy regarding MT use by the hearing children. However, for deaf children, no such policy exists; therefore, the use of the deaf child's MT (Kenyan Sign Language (KSL)) in schools for…

Social inclusion policy in Australia has largely ignored key issues of communication for linguistic minorities, across communities and with the mainstream community. In the (now disbanded) Social Inclusion Board's reports (e.g., Social Inclusion Unit, 2009), the emphasis is on the economic aspects of inclusion, while little attention has been paid…