In this article, the authors describe qualitative research conducted in the large and diverse states of California and Texas that examine the beliefs and experiences of preservice teachers in relation to issues of cultural and linguistic diversity and education. In this research, the authors found that even within teacher preparation programs,…

Diversity--social, cultural, linguistic and ethnic--poses a challenge to all educational systems. Some authorities, schools and teachers look upon it as a problem, an obstacle to the achievement of national educational goals, while for others it offers new opportunities. Successive PISA reports have laid bare the relative lack of success in…

Diversity and intercultural awareness initiatives are increasingly common at institutions of higher education in the USA. Although students recognize and appreciate the diversity of their surroundings, studies show that intercultural interactions at the social level are lacking. This study focuses on how English language learners, multilingual…

There has been a continuous debate over a long period over the issue of using the learner's mother tongue in teaching the second language. We have two schools in this regard--monolingual approach and bilingual approach. Those advocating the monolingual approach have claimed that learning is determined by the quantity of exposure to the target…

This article reports on the results of a study which investigated advanced Cantonese English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' use of a monolingual dictionary for determining the meanings of familiar English words used in less familiar contexts. Thirty-two university English majors in Hong Kong participated in a dictionary consultation task,…

"Voices of Pedagogical Development" is a collection of articles written by teacher-researchers at the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre. It shares the fruits of their ideas and development work in the areas of academic literacies, new forms of teaching and learning, and internationalisation. Part one aims at establishing and…

Within the Japanese English Language Teaching context and consistent with the dominant conversation role assigned to the native English speaker teacher, there exists a belief that the most effective manner in which to teach and promote multilingualism and intercultural understanding is through restricting students to monolingual practices and…

A promising source of insights into heritage language learning comes from the broader study of the role of input in language acquisition. We concentrate here on the possibility that qualitative differences in the proficiency of heritage and monolingual language learners can be traced to a qualitative difference in the input available to each…

To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word frequency (high, low), context (none, low constraint, high constraint), and level of English proficiency (monolingual, Spanish-English bilingual, Dutch-English bilingual) on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times. Semantic…

Due to the global momentum of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), Anglophones may perceive that there is less urgency for them to learn other languages than for speakers of other languages to learn English. The monolingual expectations of English speakers are evidenced not only in Anglophone countries but also abroad. This study reports on the…

The purpose of this study is to compare the vocabulary learning of monolingual learners of English as a second language with bilingual learners of English as a third language. The study is based on data from 52 monolingual Persian-speaking learners of English and 45 bilingual Azeri-Persian-speaking learners of English. All the participants were…

This article reports on the results of a questionnaire and interview survey on Cantonese ESL learners' preference for bilingualised dictionaries or monolingual dictionaries. The questionnaire survey was implemented with about 160 university English majors in Hong Kong and three focus group interviews were conducted with 14 of these participants.…

This volume brings together research carried out in a variety of geographic and linguistic contexts including Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States and explores efforts to incorporate linguistic diversity into education and to "harness" this diversity for learners' benefit. It challenges the largely…

This article draws on a survey of 64 self-identified multilingual faculty from across the disciplines who currently teach with writing in English at the undergraduate and graduate level. The survey asked faculty about their linguistic experiences from childhood through the present and thus offers insights about the complexity of multilingual…

This paper looks at the intersection between higher education, language and identity in Britain. It examines the reflections of minority ethnic graduates on their undergraduate studies in a new university in London. The graduates are from widening participation backgrounds and are multilingual. The paper explores how these graduates experienced…