Argues that students' mother tongue should be allowed in the second language classroom sometimes and for certain purposes. Conducted an empirical study within the context of tertiary level English reading classes in China to see whether students' mother tongue is used, the purposes for using it, and the attitudes of teachers and students toward…

Argues that awareness of the relationship between language and the sociocultural context in which it occurs is important for students and teachers. The article suggests that everyday, ephemeral texts can be easily collected and categorized according to genre for teaching and cross-cultural comparison. (19 references) (Author/CK)

This article offers teachers 12 suggestions for dealing with cursing by students, such as teaching students the differences among assaultive cursing, racial insults and slurs, lewd and sexually assaultive insults and slurs, and profanity and epithets; differentially reinforcing less offensive profanity; trying self-mediated interventions; and…

Refutes the claim that Latin can be spoken as if it were a modern language. This article is an effort to combat the movement to teach Latin by the four skills approach and to call for a return to an honest and reasonable way of teaching the classical language, along lines that help preserve its uniqueness and traditional integrity. (21 references)…

A Puerto Rican scholar describes his second-grade experiences as a newcomer to the U.S. mainland: learning English required forgetting Spanish, and this "forgetting" was a requirement for successful inclusion into a new culture. Language has regulatory power to set up conditions for belonging and exclusion, but resistance to the hegemony…

Explores the links between second language use, membership, and social contexts through the accounts of recently arrived immigrant students in Australian high schools. Argues that a key notion linking language use and identity is that of self-representation. (Author/VWL)

Reports on exploratory ethnographic research on language acquisition and use in a village located in the Mandara Mountains, Cameroon. Indicates that members of the community share several beliefs and practices related to multilingual communicative competence and its development. (Author/VWL)

Investigates whether business executives and business communication academics were bothered by examples of perceived errors in grammar or usage. Finds usage elements that troubled readers most were basic sentence-structure errors (run-ons, fragments, nonparallel structure, and danglers); several usage errors may be in transition to acceptability;…

Emphasizes kinship systems and language choice among academics in a multilingual capital in India. Interviews with 17 faculty members reveal reasons why some parents use English with their children at home. (Author/VWL)

This paper makes a usage-based contribution to the learning and teaching of German via the tools of contrastive learner corpus analysis (Granger, 1998; Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2004). On the basis of an integrated learner and native speaker corpus of "telecollaborative" discourse (Belz, 2005), an empirically rich…

This study examined 122 high academic achieving Mexican American seniors from 7 schools in South Texas. The results found that fathers' education, families' equal use of English and Spanish, family support of students' growth into areas of their own particular interests, and students' openness to experience had the highest correlations with…

This article looks at the way language subtly shapes and constrains the way we perceive reality. It examines one term-parental involvement. This apparently simple and democratic term serves as a portfolio of meanings that separate and divide. It illustrates two of these meanings, which take the form of a conjoined metaphor of "full/empty", or…

Many students are unsuccessful in the study of school mathematics, not because of some innate ability, but because of pedagogical practices. Bernstein (1996) has argued that pedagogy serves as a mechanism for cultural reproduction, so that for those students whose cultures are different from that represented in and through pedagogy, the task of…

This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria.…

The domains of application in applied linguistics have changed considerably since the early 1960s. In most of these domains, the fundamental property of language as "a resource for making meaning" has increasingly been foregrounded. This approach recognises, amongst other dimensions of language, its multi-stratal character, i.e. that a given…