A significant and growing percentage of the children enrolled in early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs in Europe and the United States are children of recent im/migrants. For most young (3-5 years old) children of parents who have come from other countries, ECEC settings are the first context in which they come face to face with…

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) currently offers three bilingual programs and two English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for English language learners (ELLs). These programs are intended to facilitate ELLs' integration into the regular school curriculum and to ensure access to equal educational opportunities. This evaluation…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the communicative strategies used by two effective first grade teachers whose students came from lower SES communities marked by a high incidence of school failure. One school was in Akko, Israel and one was in New Jersey in the US. In both settings, the teachers taught lessons in a language that was…

Though this exercise was originally designed for a first year course in women's studies that emphasizes representations of girls and women, it is also entirely appropriate to students considering matters of gender and sexuality in the fields of media studies, communications, sociology, political science, and cultural studies. This teaching…

Lexical semantics is the field of cognitive science which attempts to explain how speakers learn to use and accept sentences like "She filled the glass with water" but avoid and reject sentences like "She poured the glass with water," often with poor or impoverished evidence. In order to explain why some verbs alternate in…

Researchers and scholars agree that women and men use language differently and that these differences can lead to miscommunication and conflict. However, there is a paucity of research related to gendered language between faculty members with a doctoral degree. This qualitative research focused on language used between faculty members employed at…

Patterns of conceptualization reflected in figurative language are motivated by embodied experience, and comparisons of emotion metaphors in English, Mandarin Chinese and other languages have shown widespread similarity in such metaphors cross-culturally (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999; King 1989; Yu 1996; Kovecses 2005). Nonetheless, we can also…

The purposes of this naturalistic, descriptive study were to examine the stories that children in one first grade classroom told in a storytelling circle, how the children's knowledge, in-school experiences, and out-of-school experiences were reflected in their stories, and how the children used their knowledge and experiences as tools to…

This dissertation is a linguistic approach to theology informed by the philosophical work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is situated in the construction of Puerto Rican identity in the elliptic Puerto Rican geography of the island and the Puerto Rican immigration settlements on the mainland. Its goal is the truthful proclamation of the Gospel to the…

How might institutional projects to improve the status of minority languages and publics have unintended and contradictory consequences? This dissertation examines media and language practices in order to illuminate the everyday sociocultural processes by which the value of knowledge is figured. It focuses on news media institutions in the Buryat…

This study is concerned with the acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Both a verb's semantic class (Levin, 1993; Pinker, 1989) and its frequency (Ambridge et al., 2008) have been proposed to influence the acquisition of verbs in L1. For example, verbs whose meaning entails change-of-location or…

Many of the questions received by the magazine column "Ask Teaching Tolerance" are from educators seeking advice about how to respond when someone--a student, a colleague, even a parent--uses biased language or stereotypes in school. This booklet is a response to these questions. It's for educators who want to develop the skills to speak up…

Both the language of performance management and the target-setting culture of our schools lead to a "depersonalisation" of education--a failure to respect young learners as persons. They become a "means" to some further non-educational "end". John Macmurray challenged this depersonalisation in terms not only of its impoverished educational…

Depending on how one does the math, there are between a quarter-million and a million words in the English language. Of all these words, the author holds in contempt only one. That word is "like"--not the tepid expression of mild appreciation but the parasitic form that now bleeds the mother tongue, marks the user as a dunce, and, were it truly…

According to the nonce borrowing hypothesis (NBH), "[n]once borrowings pattern exactly like their native counterparts in the (unmixed) recipient language" (Poplack & Meechan, 1998a, p. 137). Nonce borrowings (Sankoff, Poplack & Vanniarajan, 1990, p. 74) are "lone other-language items" which differ from established borrowings in terms of frequency…