The concept of framing from anthropology and sociolinguistics is useful for understanding student reasoning. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for sensemaking or as an assignment to fill out a worksheet. The student's framing affects what she notices, what knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. We…

Drawing on critical, socio-cultural and sociolinguistic theories of writing, text and voice, this ethnographic study examines the challenges that a mature ESL student and her instructors in a university course on Spanish Language Media face as they co-construct a common understanding of academic literacy and voice in an undergraduate General…

There are abundant studies on second/foreign language learners' identities. However, there appears to be insufficient longitudinal research on the construction of learners' L2 identities in systematic interactions between fixed dyads in an out-of-class context. Adopting a critical discourse analysis framework (Fairclough, 2003) and suitably…

The aim of the present study is to examine factors affecting participation in telecollaborative language courses conducted in virtual world environments. From recordings of a course in sociolinguistics conducted in Second Life (SL), we determine degrees of linguistic participation (voice and chat), and triangulate these data with questionnaire…

This study investigates the problems of EFL/ESL university students' unwillingness to speak and take part in class discussions. Saudi students find it inappropriate to speak in class because of their fear to be seen as verbally challenging their teachers' views openly and publicly. Even when they do, they speak a little. This leads to frustration…

This article examines the inclusion of a culturally relevant curricular practice of social identity papers within teacher education in the USA that incorporates the transnational lifeworlds of teachers. Using tenets of feminist interdisciplinary frameworks, we highlight how this curricular practice allows teachers and teacher candidates in urban…

Language can provide an entree into an academic discipline, but can also serve as a barrier to exclude newcomers. How does this apply to academic developers trying to promote teaching and learning on their campuses? Using an online survey, academics at two institutions in the UK and USA were asked to describe their typical and ideal reading in…

This study examines language attitudes among Mongols in Inner Mongolia, using an extensive questionnaire. Forty Mongolian students who are studying at Inner Mongolia Normal University participated in this study. The results show that Mongols hold more positive attitudes toward putonghua and English than toward the Mongolian language in many…

The Problem: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of Vietnam's globalization on national language education policies and teacher training programs for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Specifically, this research explored the extent to which the new policies for English language training programs adopted by the…

The National Institute of Education in Singapore (which is part of the Nanyang Technological University) is the leading national pre-service and in-service teacher training tertiary institution. It offers diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The academic departments are called Academic Groups (AGs). The English Language and…

In this study, we explore the cognitive style profiles and linguistic patterns of self-organizing groups within a web-based graduate education course to determine how cognitive preferences and individual behaviors influence the patterns of information exchange and the formation of communication hierarchies in an online classroom. Network analysis…

Foreign language proficiency and learning are crucial parts of many study abroad programs; especially those whose host culture language is different than that of the native language of students electing to study in them. Indeed, how a program organizes itself regarding pre-departure language proficiency requirements, on site language learning, and…

Despite its potential, online dialogue (online dialogue) can be superficial. Following Vygotskian (1978) and design experiment approaches (Brown, 1992), this study explores a labelling feature that allows students to tag parts of their messages. Data comes from 4 sessions of a graduate education course. Students engaged in 2-3 graded online…

In two experiments, we investigated predictions of the "collaborative theory of language use" (Clark, 1996) as applied to instant messaging (IM). This theory describes how the presence and absence of different grounding constraints causes people to interact differently across different communicative media (Clark & Brennan, 1991). In Study 1, we…

The effects of high-stakes, standardized testing on the curriculum are discouraging the teaching of multicultural, anti-racist content. Test-influenced educational environments contribute to the reproduction of racial and cultural inequality in education. Using the lens of sociolinguistics, the author asserts that high-stakes, standardized tests…