This article explores the critical role of school leaders in language policy change, and specifically in shifting their language education policies and practices from monolingual to multilingual. We examine the process of language policy change in three schools that were involved in a project aimed at increasing the knowledge base of school…

The role of corrective feedback in second language classrooms has received considerable research attention in the past few decades. However, most of this research has been conducted in English-teaching settings, either ESL or EFL. This study examined teacher feedback, learner uptake as well as learner and teacher perception of feedback in an adult…

In a context of the internationalisation of Higher Education (HE) driven by the high mobility of international Higher Degree Research candidates (HDRs), it is important to consider the value of HDRs' multilingual capabilities for their learning and making of original contributions to knowledge. This article reports on a literature study regarding…

Much of what is known about the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in second language Spanish is based on studies of English-speaking learners. This body of research has demonstrated common pathways in the acquisition of multiple variable structures, as well as how second language learners come to use (or not) Spanish in linguistically and…

The qualitative study reported in this paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of curriculum and its interpretation and implementation by secondary school teachers. It explores what teachers do to respond to a curriculum that increasingly adopts a values-laden perspective (e.g., social justice education, critical literacy) that establishes…

Variations in cultural practices between families and schools have emerged as central to many studies (Rogoff, 2003) and these dynamic variations have been named as "repertoires" of cultural practice (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). Emerging from this literature has been a recognition of the dynamic tension between the cultural practices…

This paper aims to identify how Taiwanese and Mandarin (the two dominant languages in Taiwan) are used as interactional resources by Vietnamese female spouses in bilingual Taiwanese families. Three Vietnamese-Taiwanese transnational families (a total of seventeen people) participated in the research, and mealtime talks among the Vietnamese wives…

This paper presents results from a pilot project that sought to establish parental motivations for raising children bilingually in regional Australia in the absence of a co-located speech community. Cultural and linguistic diversity outside metropolitan areas is increasing as a result of Commonwealth Government incentive schemes, and one effect of…

We introduce a new method, "differential language analysis" (DLA), for studying human development in which computational linguistics are used to analyze the big data available through online social media in light of psychological theory. Our open vocabulary DLA approach finds words, phrases, and topics that distinguish groups of people…

The minimal-marking project conducted in Ryerson's School of Journalism throughout 2012 and early 2013 resulted in significantly higher grammar scores in two first-year classes of minimally marked university students when compared to two traditionally marked classes. The "minimal-marking" concept (Haswell, 1983), which requires…

Global interest in the value of student engagement in higher education has led researchers to question whether the use of the term is clear and consistent. This article investigates the construction of the term "student engagement" at three US universities through an analysis of qualitative data. Whereas a shared understanding of the…

When you think of global, online education, the first thing that may jump to mind these days are MOOCs, the "massive open online classes" that are widely publicized (and criticized). The author states that his classes were not these, but rather, closer to what are now being called SPOCs--small private online classes. Enrollment is…

This study presents an overall review of the paradigms that contribute to the making and development of functional human linguistics and communication skills and the teaching of language.

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

This small-scale pilot study aimed to establish how the mode of response in an examination affects candidates' performances on items that require an extended answer. The sample comprised 46 17-year-old students from two classes (one in a state secondary school and one in a state sixth-form college), who sat a mock A-level English Literature…