In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

Employing drama activities in foreign language classes has proved to help language learners improve their skills. Within the context of drama course offered in an English Language Teacher Education program in Turkey, the present study suggests some drama activities based on well-known Nasreddin Hodja jokes. The study aims to find answers to…

At a community college in Florida, the associate of science in nursing (ASN) program has experienced low persistence rates especially after the first semester of study. Framed by Jeffreys's nursing undergraduate retention and success model, a mixed-method approach was used to investigate first-semester and final-year ASN students' perceptions of…

Because language, as a method of communication, is a two-way channel involving both speakers and listeners, a methodical study of linguistic variation should involve an analysis of both, how it is expressed and how it is interpreted. Furthermore, because language is known to vary between individuals (inter-speaker variation) as well as at the…

Since 1997, Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) has published the Newark Kids Count Data Book, a one-stop source for child well-being data on the state's largest city. Newark Kids Count includes the latest statistics, along with five-year trend data, in the following areas: demographics, family economic security, child health, child…

Sometimes students manage to complete investigations without really using complex and scientific language. Even when they use scientific vocabulary, they do not always build logical arguments to communicate their findings. In this article, the author describes how several elementary science teachers addressed this challenge in after-school STEM…

This study, carried out at a major technological university in China and based on a convenience sample of 116 students, is designed to identify which aspects of their classroom environments had the greatest effect on the students. Students completed a 26-item questionnaire which elicited general as well as specific views on the EFL classroom…

This case study explores how Swedish upper secondary students communicate in English as part of second language learning, in a blog shared with Thai students. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective on learning, the notions of Goffman's "frame shifting" and Bakhtin's concept of "carnival" are employed to analyse two specific…

Drawing upon video recordings from two fifth-grade Ukrainian classrooms and interviews with children four years later, this paper examines these classrooms as sites for socializing learners into an "imagined community" of Ukrainian speakers, the extent to which children took up identities as members of this community, and the potential…

Meaningful learning requires the integration of cognitive and affective learning with the psychomotor, i.e., hands-on learning. The undergraduate chemistry laboratory is an ideal place for meaningful learning to occur. However, accurately characterizing students' affective experiences in the chemistry laboratory can be a very difficult task. While…

For children learning English as an additional language, dialogic teaching supports both learning content and learning language. Engaging language learners in dialogue offers special challenges, however. This article describes an instructional approach that focused on engendering purposeful and cumulative talk, supported by metalanguage from…

To account for the full range of language use in contemporary multilingual urban contexts, the notion of target language (TL) needs to be reconsidered. In studies of second language acquisition and language variation, taking TL for granted implies that people agree on what constitutes "good" language, or the standard norm. The TL of…

This paper deals with language practices in one Pentecostal church in Cameroon, i.e. the Full Gospel Mission Cameroon (FGMC). The data are produced by some 80 pastors, church officials, choir leaders and congregants, and the settings are some 20 churches located in two anglophone regions and two francophone regions of Cameroon. The instruments…

In the wake of the enactment of Sweden's Language Act in 2009 and in the face of the growing presence of English, Swedish universities have been called upon by the Swedish Higher Education Authority to craft their own language policy documents. This study focuses on the discursive negotiation of institutional bilingualism by a language policy…

This article reports on the peer socialization of gendered Mandarin practices between three American students and their Chinese roommates in a college dorm in China. Gender is often perceived to be a salient identity category among adult L2 learners overseas. Drawing on the language socialization framework (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984), this study…