This paper reports on a study that analysed the ideological framing of "Chinese dialects" or "regional Chinese varieties" in the mainland China's state print media reports of "dialect crisis" and the associated efforts to sustain the use of these "dialects" from 2002 to 2012. The analysis revealed that…

This study is centered on a youth center in Berlin, Germany, that serves migrant females. It draws on the anthropology of performance and the concept of "friction" to argue for an understanding of performances of belonging, where migrant girls stage acts of inclusion through creative encounters with the forces of integration to negotiate…

Vocabulary is an important part of language which is central to all language skills and meaningful communication. One way through which vocabulary learning can be facilitated is by the use of vocabulary learning strategies (VLS). VLSs can empower language learners to be more self-directed, regulated, and autonomous. Also, they can help language…

During a phenomenological-narrative study regarding the perspectives of leadership among women who are both Native and Deaf, a portion of the data collection focused on visual art as a means of interpreting what leadership meant to the participants. Participants produced visual imagery to impart their ways of knowing as women who negotiated their…

A unique aspect of special education is the mandate for parent involvement. The Individuals with Disabilities Act of 1990 (IDEA) and its reauthorization in 2004 require professionals to involve parents of students with disabilities in the educational decision-making process. This article seeks to clarify reasons why materials produced through the…

Self-efficacy, which is the belief about one's ability to perform a task successfully, has been widely acknowledged as important in learning. This affective factor, though not explicitly evident, has been said to play an important role in academic performance. However, its role in reading development has not been widely investigated. To determine…

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in the role of humor and play in second-language (L2) learning and teaching. Drawing on the methods of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics, researchers have sought to understand how teachers and students "do" humor and play, what functions humor and play serve,…

The following study explores the attitudes of 40 Hispanic families towards Spanish and their ethnic community in Houston and its suburbs. The research participants included 20 Colombian families and 20 Mexican families. A mixed methodology using quantitative and qualitative methods was used. Through family's observation, surveys and interviews to…

This piece looks at how banned books can offer an illuminating glimpse into social constructions of "healthy" and "normal" adolescent development. Unease with certain materials and topics in the secondary classroom can provide productive points of inquiry for both teachers and students.

Purpose: We examined the relationship between maternal level of education as an index of socioeconomic status (SES) on the narrative story retells of school-aged children who are English language learners (ELLs) to guide interpretation of results. Method: Using data available from the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts database (Miller…

Parent-child conversations about shared events may facilitate important aspects of psychosocial development through the family's references to emotions. Although past research has begun examining features of speakers and topics that predict emotion talk in these conversations, the potential contribution of personality traits has been overlooked.…

This paper examines ideologies of American study abroad in politically and culturally "non-Western" countries. Drawing from the theory of orientalism (Said, 1978), we analyze how American public discourse on study abroad for learners of Mandarin and Arabic manifests an orientalist thinking, and how such macro discourse both produces…

Teachers of English in Cameroon are proficient speakers of Cameroon English and their non-native status militates against their usage of Standard British English in the English language classrooms. This makes the attainment of British English thorny and perhaps impossible in Cameroon. Standing on that premise, we were motivated to find out…

The apparent gap between positive attitudes and low levels of everyday usage of the language is often cited as one of the greatest challenges facing Irish language revitalisation. In a context of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in the Republic of Ireland, this article reports on a research project which set out to explore the…

The thrust of this study was to examine the critical challenges inhibiting effective participation in education by pupils from rural public primary schools in Central Division, Narok North Sub-County, in Narok County, Kenya. The study adopted a descriptive cross-sectional research design. Combinations of stratified and purposive sampling…