This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Cornish, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers,…

In the face of land confiscations and other forms of imperialism characteristic of the 19th century in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the second Maori King Tawhiao devised a number of sayings that seem at first glance to be entirely mythical. Highly metaphorical and poetic, they appear to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a…

This article documents the current research efforts of a research team at a Colombian university to explore the new forms of literacies in second languages in the city. The different research projects from this research team aim to break the social imaginaries, often perpetuated in policies, that people in cities are not using English as a…

Nominal and pronominal address forms, which play a central role in the construction of interpersonal relations (cf. Bargiela et al. 2002; Clyne et al. 2009), have been the focus of attention in different linguistics subfields for several decades now. Less attention, however, has been paid to these forms from a variational pragmatics (Schneider and…

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their…

We have performed comparative analysis on professional training of linguists at British and Ukrainian universities at administrative and managerial, legislative, organizational and pedagogical, systemic, conceptual, socioeconomic levels. As evidenced above, British and Ukrainian systems of professional training of linguists differ significantly,…

The apparent gap between positive attitudes and low levels of everyday usage of the language is often cited as one of the greatest challenges facing Irish language revitalisation. In a context of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in the Republic of Ireland, this article reports on a research project which set out to explore the…

The aim of a discourse-pragmatic approach to teaching the indicative/subjunctive contrast in Spanish is to engage students to move beyond grammar and semantics and enter the domain of language use in complete texts. Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research have mostly focused on the morphology, semantics and syntactic aspects of…

Most studies on task-based language learning focus on the oral performance of advanced level learners of English as a second language (ESL), while little research examines the written performance of beginning language learners in non-ESL contexts. This exploratory study aims to address this gap, by examining the effect of pre-writing tasks on…

Language revitalization work at one First Nation in eastern Canada has been ongoing for over two decades. Several approaches have been put in place: core teaching of Mi'gmaq as a primary school subject, language documentation and the creation of an online dictionary, and an Elders' focus group on language, as well other shorter-term projects. In…

Prepositional phrases (PPs) are considered an important feature of mature written expression. However, little is known about the development of PPs during the school years. The study examined the use of PPs in 160 narrative and expository texts, written by Hebrew-users in grades 4, 7, and 11, and adults. PPs were identified, counted, and…

Although it is a core component of a language user's overall linguistic competence, vocabulary has traditionally not received the kind of attention it deserved, being usually lumped with other kinds of competence till 1980s and 1990s when researchers started focusing on it with great interest. The present paper discusses what the notion of lexical…

In this "First Person Singular" essay, the author describes her education, teaching experience, and interest in understanding the learning of language. Anyone reading this essay will not be surprised to learn that the author's questions about language learning and optimal teaching methods were only met with further questions, and no…

The present study evaluated the effects of explicit instruction on advanced French second language (L2) learners' (n = 18) contextually appropriate use of two stylistic variables (/l/ deletion vs. retention and "ne" deletion vs. retention) using two different task types. A planned and unplanned oral task was used to assess students'…

It is clear that a proper understanding of what academic English is and how to use it is crucial for success in college, and yet students face multiple obstacles in acquiring this new "code", not least that their professors often cannot agree amongst themselves on a definition and a set of rules. "Understanding Language Use in the…