Mary Lou Cobb gives a framework from a very practical point of view, leaning on the aspects of grace and courtesy that are fundamental and arise out of a Montessori administrative point of view. Her examples are pragmatic, such as the grace and courtesy of a greeting, of movement, as a whole-school culture, and the right use of language. She calls…

Within the study of language in society, new sociolinguistic notions are increasingly gaining ground, e.g. the notion of polylanguaging. Polylanguaging is defined as "the phenomenon that speakers employ linguistic resources at their disposal which are associated with different 'languages,' including the cases in which the speakers know only…

ESL learners can find it challenging to use English in a way that is pragmatically appropriate to the situation and interlocutor. In this article, we explore the impact of increased proficiency on learners' pragmatic performance. ESL learners in Australia at four proficiency levels completed three role plays, and we analysed how the learners…

Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies assert colorblindness flourishes when most urban teachers who are White feel emotionally uncomfortable to engage in dynamics of race in the classroom. Colorblind ideology distorts urban teaching because it presumes (a) many White teachers are missionaries trained to save and (b) urban schools are…

In this article the way bilinguals handle differing semantic categories in their two languages will be investigated. Drawing on bilingual data from multilingual speakers of Romansh as well as from speakers of (Swiss) German, the tensions that emerge from "conflicting habits" in the two languages are analyzed in the semantic domain of…

The first paper in this collection refers to recent theorising about Globalisation and the resultant outcomes for educational contexts specifically in relation to English language learning in Australia. Much has been written about the importance of the global economy, its influence on education and mounting commentary that the English language is…

Purpose: This study examined the latent dimensionality of Spanish in young Spanish-English dual-language learners (DLLs). Method: Two hundred eighty-six children participated. In their prekindergarten year, children completed norm-referenced and experimental language measures in Spanish requiring different levels of cognitive processing in both…

This paper is on semantics of words and expressions of various grammatical constructions that make reference to violence as reported in the Nigerian media, particularly, the newspaper where such words and sentences about violence are prominent. Twenty-four (24) headlines/captions on violence were randomly selected from Nigeria dailies for data…

The purpose of this case study was to describe a single multicultural women's support program known as the Women of Care Project. The program was conducted in a community in the Midwest region of the United States and began in 2005 with a grant from the Open Meadows Foundation. Participants were volunteers who were recruited for the program…

Low socio-economic groups are typically difficult to recruit and retain in health research, which makes it difficult to investigate their health-related beliefs and behaviours. Low socio-economic parents with overweight or obese children took part in a longitudinal qualitative child obesity study over 12 months. These parents' views of and…

This study examines several linguistic factors as possible contributors to perceived word difficulty in second language learners in an experimental setting. The investigated factors include: (1) frequency of word usage in the first language, (2) word length, (3) number of syllables in a word, and (4) number of consonant clusters in a word. Word…

In this study, we considered how middle school teachers understood the relationship between fractions and ratios. We used two instruments to collect data from 11 teachers and relied on Knowledge in Pieces as a lens for considering understandings teachers have and how coherent those understandings are. From our analysis, we developed three main…

Understanding how young children are socialized to the process and products of storytelling as part of everyday family life is important for language and literacy instruction. A language socialization framework was used to understand storytelling practices on the Navajo Nation. This study examined how three young English-speaking Navajo children,…

This paper aims to investigate the potential of printed computer advertisements (between 1970 and 1990) in the development of communicative and written competence in English language along with teaching computer technologies. The research was conducted with 179 printed computer advertisements and the data was taken by the help of Abbyy Finereader…

This dissertation examined the role of maternal input in word order acquisition of Mandarin-speaking children from the one-word to multi-word stages. Four questions about the role of maternal input were addressed: frequency effects, age-related changes, utterance type effects, and verb diversity effects. Predictions for each question were made…