Confronts the challenges of getting young actors to embrace the use of language. Presents a series of exercises designed to expose students to the potential power of the spoken word by using three different kinds of texts: advertising copy, children's storybooks, and the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Discusses how the author engages his…

Discusses when it is permissible to use the word "nigger," noting the word's unique status and examining how to determine its potency in comparison to other racial epithets. Examines the history of the word's use and current uses by comedians, the media, and people of different races. Presents an example of the word's controversial use…

Examines two areas of applied linguistics: corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis, where linguistic description makes claims to be directly relevant to real world problems in language use and learning. (Author/VWL)

A comprehensive phraseological study of Esperanto, based on detailed test analyses, participant observation and surveys, reveals both similarities and differences in comparison to ethnic or national languages. Relatively high level of metalinguistic consciousness and creativity were observed, coupled with widely differing attitudes towards the…

Presents diary excerpts that emerged from two separate teaching experiences with fifth and second graders. Reflects on the author's efforts to communicate the wonder of language and imagination to students. Concludes that by taking account of his own lessons as well as the students' responses to the exercises, the author discovered in a new light…

This article responds to Fran Danis and Lettie Lockhart's editorial in the Summer 2003 "Journal of Social Work Education" (Vol. 29, No. 2), which questions the disconnect between the battered women's movement and the social work profession regarding knowledge and practices related to domestic violence. The author examines how two factors might…

Assessment criteria are increasingly incorporated into teaching, making it important to clarify the pedagogic status of the qualities to which they refer. We reviewed theory and evidence about the extent to which four core criteria for student writing--critical thinking, use of language, structuring, and argument--refer to the outcomes of three…

Precision in language usage can be thought of as an ego boosting activity, a snobbish pastime, an arrogant trait; or it can be interpreted as an attempt to aid audiences in understanding exact meaning, an effort to reduce ambiguity, and/or as a positive role model for others in one's language community. This essay argues that the latter set of…

The devotion of this special issue of EER to the language of environmental and sustainable developmental education (SDE) serves as a timely reminder that SDE cannot simply be seen as a culturally neutral or value-free package that can be "delivered". In a variety of ways, contributors to this volume address the issues involved in re-engineering…

Kelvin Monroe, a jazz pianist from middle Georgia bring in one of the great racist of the Enlightenment as he focused on language and written in the Black Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies classrooms. He discusses about whiteness only as it concerns the elimination of racism and inequality in the social reality of people of color.

The overarching question in this article is: What contextual and individual-level factors influence the decision to maintain Spanish, or see to it that one's children learn and maintain it? I first model the configuration of area-specific circumstances that influence the degree to which Spanish-English bilingualism (as opposed to English…

Many students with disabilities continue to struggle with understanding what mathematics means. They memorize basic facts or step-by-step mathematical procedures without understanding the underlying concepts related to the problems. Thus, instruction designed to help students understand the meaning of the mathematics that they are learning in…

This paper examines the use of regional languages and dialects of Dutch in the Netherlands, and the relation of such to the Dutch language proficiency of primary school pupils. The data from the large-scale primary education PRIMA cohort study are analysed. A total of nearly 35,000 pupils participated in five measurement rounds covering the period…

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the traditional division between bilingual education programmes offered to speakers of majority languages and those available to minority language speakers in Colombia should be reconsidered within a wider, integrated vision of bilingual provision. Initially, developments will be situated in relation to…

According to the aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), perfective morphology emerges before imperfective morphology, it is first used in telic predicates (achievements and accomplishments) and it later extends to atelic predicates (activities and states). The opposite development is hypothesized for imperfective…