Using Jack Goody and Ian Watt's theory of literacy as a normalizing agent, I show how the presence of the English language and "English Only" values and policies have affected the Amish and their home language, Pennsylvania Dutch, and their religious language, "High" German. These changes are seen as detrimental to the Amish…

As many educators can attest, the quality of teacher-student relationships often has enormous impact on student success at every level. When teacher-student relationships improve, concurrent improvements in classroom behavior such as reductions in aggression and increases in compliance with rules can be expected. Students have also shown…

This study examines interactions from trials in the Syariah court in Malaysia. It focuses on the types of questioning, the choice of language and the linguistic resources employed in this particular context. In the discourse of law, questioning has been a prominent concern particularly in cross-examination and can be considered one of the key…

The study of bullshit, what the author calls "taurascatics", has been making a splash of late. It was Harry Frankfurt who tossed the stone: his essay "On Bullshit" came out in "Raritan" in 1986, hit the "New York Times" best-seller list as a book in 1995, and has been adopted, adapted, and criticized across the academy since. The ripples spread…

This article uses a conversation analytic framework to explore reproaches in classroom interaction. The data used is naturally occurring Finnish classroom interaction (students aged 13-15). The analysis focuses on reproaches that are used in order to silence students and in which gendered address terms are included. In the data occurrences, the…

Relatively little attention has been paid to questions of how language acts in and through the interactions of language in situations where people are encouraged to learn to be active in contexts of work. This paper argues that detailed analysis is needed to understand how activation through language acts in the shaping and governing of workers.…

This article offers a particular analytic method from systemic functional linguistics, "thematic analysis," which reveals the mathematical meaning potentials construed in discourse. Addressing concerns that discourse analysis is too often content-free, thematic analysis provides a way to represent semantic structures of mathematical content,…

Does the music idiom commonly known as rap music have educational merit? With its harshest critics lambasting it with connotations that equate it with stupidity, gun culture, jail culture, or non-intellectual culture, could there be a pedagogical link after all? Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, Associate Professor of English Education and Anthropology at…

Contraction of "want to" to "wanna" is subject to constraints that have been related to the operation of Universal Grammar. Contraction appears to be blocked when the trace of an extracted "wh"-word intervenes. Evidence for knowledge of these constraints by young English-speaking children has been taken to show the operation of Universal Grammar…

The present study examined the number-specific parental language input to Mandarin- and English-speaking preschool-aged children. Mandarin and English transcripts from the CHILDES database were examined for amount of numeric speech, specific types of numeric speech and syntactic frames in which numeric speech appeared. The results showed that…

Shakespeare molded language to meet his needs. Can students learn from his example? In this article, the author suggests studying Shakespeare's creative use of functional shift, spelling, and vocabulary to help students develop greater control of their own writing. The author is advocating that teachers approach Shakespeare as descriptive…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of a program that offered sustained strategic reading instruction on reading abilities of third and fourth graders. The study was conducted among 1,469 children from 40 schools in the Netherlands. Schools were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. Multilevel…

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 2014 International Conference of Pragmatics and Language Learning at Indiana University. It includes fourteen papers on a variety of topics, with a diversity of first and second languages, and a wide range of methods used to collect pragmatic data in L2 and FL settings. This volume is…

This report presents data on students in the United States attending kindergarten through grade 12. The main focus of the report is on parent and family involvement in the students' education during the 2011-12 school year as reported by the students' parents. It also includes the percentage of students who participated in selected family…

Newcomer students who arrive in the secondary grades face daunting challenges in order to achieve desired academic outcomes such as high school graduation and college access. Besides simultaneously developing conceptual understandings analytical and linguistic practices, newcomers also need to adapt to a new country, a new schooling system, and a…