The back and forth migration of children and youth between the United States and Mexico has created a unique group of approximately nine million "students we share" who have been educated in both countries (Jensen and Sawyer 2013). The social, political, and economic interconnectivity of the United States and Mexico suggests that these…

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual…

In this article, we examine various strategies used to express cardinal numbers in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs) from three historically unrelated communities in Yucatán, Mexico: Chicán, Nohkop, and Cepeda Peraza. Our findings describe some numeral strategies, which remained unattested in previous accounts, and demonstrate that YMSL numerals…

English is often assumed to be the national language in the US and the global language in the world; yet such views fail to address the complex linguistic repertoires of people living in linguistically heterogeneous places even within the US. Spotlighting a southwestern US border town, we provide a critique of both nation-state-language ideology,…

This article starts with an overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Latin America as a context for language policy and planning (LPP) decisions in the academic field. Then it gives a brief overview of the language policy challenges faced by universities to cope with neoliberal internationalisation. A conceptualisation of the domain as a…

Speakers must command different linguistic registers to index various social-discourse elements, including the identity of the addressee. Previous work found that English-learning children could link registers to appropriate addressees by 5 years. Two experiments found that better cues to the linguistic form or to the social meaning of register…

One quality among the many that characterize effective teachers is the ability to bring a creative disposition to teaching. In second language teaching, creativity has also been linked to levels of attainment in language learning. Many of the language tasks favored by contemporary language teaching methods are believed to release creativity in…

This article presents an ethnographic study of how bilingual teachers and children use their home language, TexMex, to mediate academic content and standard languages. From the premise that TESOL educators can benefit from a fuller understanding of students' linguistic repertoires, the study describes language practices in a second-grade classroom…

On the basis of a ten-month ethnography of a Raramuri school and community, this article contributes to the understanding of the role of sociolinguistic and socioeconomic contexts in creating Indigenous-language maintenance programs. Employing concepts of micro- and macrolevel variables in language endangerment and language vitality scales, it…

This article examines the ways in which a multimodal text--a YouTube video on globalization and business--was mediated in two English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms, and how these mediations shaped the instructor's and her students' meaning-making in specific ways. I first explore the complex multimodal discourses involved with this…

Adult education ESOL teachers usually know a lot about learners' lives inside the classroom, but they are less aware of learners' lives outside that space. This article focuses on learner talk about "Ingles Sin Barreras," a heavily advertised English-language program for Spanish-speakers who want to learn English. I analyzed learner talk…

Provides pedagogical rules for selecting relative pronouns in Spanish. Sixteen different linguistic environments in which relative pronoun usage occurs are categorized according to their different syntactic relationships and semantic intentions. (SL)

This article contains a description of the Dual Proficiency (DP) program in an urban elementary school located in the heart of a large south-western city, as well as the teachers who designed and now implement DP, and the immigrant community participating by choice in DP. We write from a context where, ironically, the number of English language…

Documents attitudes toward English, Spanish, and Spanish-English code-switching in Juarez, Mexico. This paper refutes the notion that there are two orientations--integrative and instrumental--toward English as a second language, but it supports assumptions regarding the relationship between attitudes and use and the impact of local milieu on…

Studies involving teachers of both Spanish and English as a foreign language reveal that metaphors provide teachers with a useful image to represent their views and the elusiveness of cultural concepts. It is suggested that teachers become ethnographers investigating their own beliefs as well as those of others while developing sociolinguistic…