In this paper I want to focus on the difficulty perceived by seventh grade students in connection to listening activities in the English class, at some public schools in San Juan, Argentina. This analysis will lead to the examination of contextual factors that might act as unforeseen constraints on the language learning situation. (Contains 5…

Australia's language and multicultural policies have constructed the intercultural dimension of Australian identity and practice in a number of different ways relating to different community groups. This paper traces the evolution of multicultural policy from the 1970s until the present through the main national policy documents in order to…

This paper reconsiders the theoretical concept of "identity slippage" by considering a detailed exegesis of three model conversations taught to learners of Japanese as an additional language. To inform my analysis of these conversations and how they contribute to identity slippage, I have used the work of the systemic-functional linguist Jay Lemke…

There are normally two major research reasons for assessing second and foreign language (L2) knowledge: either to gauge a participant's actual level of competence/proficiency or to assess language development over a period of time. In testing, the corresponding contrasts are typically referred to as proficiency tests on the one hand and…

As the cultural and ethnic diversity of the student population rises within school districts across the nation, the matter of translating materials in a language that is understandable and meaningful to the target population becomes more pressing. There are multitude of problems inherent in translation of materials from one language to another. To…

Subordinate femininity associated with feminine Japanese has been found to pose barriers for foreign language learners of Japanese, especially among Western female learners of Japanese. The present study investigates attitudes towards the use of both masculine and feminine Japanese among non-native professional speakers of Japanese. The latter's…

Much attention has been given to the concept of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in recent years. In this article, the premises on which the claims of ELF are based are examined. These claims are submitted to critical scrutiny, and it is suggested that they may well be both statistically and theoretically flawed. More importantly, the dilemmas…

In this article, the "multiple voices" of 13-15-year-old German and Italian adolescents in internet guest-books are analyzed. The study is based on guest-books texts with a mixture of different registers, languages and dialects. In particular, the German adolescents from the Augsburg region (Bavaria) display a strong regional linguistic…

This article reports the findings of a study whose objective was to investigate whether there was a likelihood of a language shift (or loss) from Ikalanga (a minority language spoken in Botswana) to either Setswana or English. The focus of the investigation was 17-25 year olds. The findings indicate that although Ikalanga (unlike indigenous…

In this paper, I investigate the status of the so-called "weaker" language, French, in French/German bilingual first language acquisition, using data from two children from the DuFDE-corpus (see Schlyter, 1990a), Christophe and Francois. Schlyter (1993, 1994) proposes that the "weaker" language in the unbalanced children she studied has the status…

A number of researchers are currently attempting to create listings of important collocations for students of EAP. However, so far these attempts have (1) failed to include positionally-variable collocations, and (2) not taken sufficient account of variation across disciplines. The present paper describes the creation of one listing of…

The Modern Language Association report and "Profession" issue from summer 2007 (Geisler et al., 2007) are highly indicative of the increasingly debated concerns in the profession surrounding (1) the traditional division of foreign language curriculum between "language" and "literature" and (2) the instruction of textual analysis (or practice of…

This article adopts a Bakhtinian analysis to understand the complexities of discourse in language-learning classrooms. Drawing on empirical data from two of four linked case studies in a larger, ESRC-funded project, we argue that students learning in complementary (also known as community language, supplementary, or heritage language) schools…

With a focus on educational provision the area of English as a second language (ESL), this paper takes stock of developments in the last 10 years since the inception of the Australian "Literacy for All" policy in 1998. A review of the issue is timely, not least because of the recent window of opportunity afforded by the first change of…

While Kachru's Three Circles model of World Englishes (Kachru 1985, 1986; Kachru and Nelson 1996) has been highly influential in highlighting the changing distribution and functions of English, it has also been criticized for its inability to account for the heterogeneity and dynamics of English-using communities, and for perpetuating the very…