The main aim of this exploratory study was to establish how Batswana teens (natives of Botswana), who predominantly spoke English in social interactions, negotiated communication transactions with non-speakers of English. The author presents her reflections in the manner of a think piece, However, she interviewed some young Batswana to help…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

Purpose: The overarching purpose of this paper is to explore the transformation of intercultural education in Cyprus in the context of European integration. More specifically, it indicates the ways in which intercultural policy has been formed by complex and often counteractive influences. The analysis draws upon policy documents collected from…

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of age and family socioeconomic status (SES) on the evaluative language performance of Mandarin-Chinese-speaking young children and their mothers. The participants were 65 mother-child dyads recruited in Taiwan. Thirty-four of these dyads were from middle-class families and 31 were from…

This study explored pronoun production and general syntactic abilities in story retelling and story generation among children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty-four children diagnosed with ASD, ages 6;1-14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children ages 5;11-14;4 participated in the study. The linguistic measures for general syntax…

Much research is available that details student experiences of immigration and adaptation to receiving countries and schools, but few studies analyze the metaphors used by immigrant students (IS) when talking about the immigration experience, or offer a comparative lens through which to view identity negotiation in two very different contexts. The…

Contrary to earlier studies dealing with the cultural identity development of diasporic minorities, this paper assesses the impact of homogeneity on intra-group cohesion and ethnic orientation. To this end, Oromo-Americans, an ethnic group originally located within the national borders of Ethiopia, will be compared to Armenian-Americans,…

Patterns of transmigration emerging as a consequence of globalization are creating new and complex markets for communicative resources in which languages and language varieties are differently valued. In a Swedish context, where lingua franca English can facilitate communication but where monolingual norms prevail and Swedish is positioned as the…

This study aims to present high school students' perception of "English" through the impressions and images and the effect of these perceptions on their motivation in learning English. This qualitative study is based on the data about students' metaphors and the focus group interview to determine their effect on the students' motivation.…

Transmission-based language classrooms have been mostly dominated by teachers' authority, as reflected in IRF (Teacher Initiation, Student Response, Teacher Follow up/Feedback) architecture of their discourses. By contrast, Critical Pedagogy (CP) has been after fostering multivocality in and out of classroom borders. Which qualities of teacher…

This study analyzes the educational achievement gap between low and high socioeconomic students from the perspective of sixty-two prospective teachers in an undergraduate educational foundations course at a public majority minority urban university in the northeastern United States. The majority of these college students come from, and plan to…

Only a few characteristics of picture-based narrative prompts have been studied to determine what features affect task performance. Thus, it is not easy to identify equivalent narrative prompts or identify features that are impactful. Tavakoli and Foster (2008) and Tavakoli (2009) examined the impact of prompt on the language produced by English…

Language education faculty face myriad challenges in finding teaching resources that are suitable, of high quality, and allow for the modifications needed to meet the requirements of their course contexts and their learners. The article elaborates the grassroots model of "produsage" (a portmanteau of "production" and…

At the emergence of democracy in South Africa the government corrected linguistic imbalances by officialising eleven languages. Prior to that only English and Afrikaans were the recognised official languages. The Black population had rejected the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. However, such rejection did not mean the…

This study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markers "wa" and "ga" from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES…