The study focuses on defining specifics of the language policy and planning in the Russian Federation, the USA, and China within the modern political discourse of the 21st century by means of exploring materials from Russian, American and Chinese media. The empirical base of the study included statistical and sociological data describing the…

This paper revisits the tension in sociolinguistics between the linguistic capital associated with languages of socioeconomic mobility, and the cultural and identity value of local languages. With Malaysia as a case study, the paper shows that although this economy-versus-culture tension may be a go-to ideological paradigm in sociolinguistics for…

The increasing occurrence of multilingualism in the educational sphere is challenging teachers to deal with the coexistence of different languages in the classroom. The present paper presents the analysis of language portraits as a tool to make students' multilingualism visible by using colours to represent their multilingual repertoires. Through…

This essay is based on a June 2014 interview with Bernard Spolsky, in which he discussed his life with educational linguistics. A self-described "accidental professor," Spolsky directed the first study of Navajo sociolinguistics, established educational linguistics as a field of study and practice, co-created a national language policy…

In this field note we discuss findings from pilot research on a variety of heritage German spoken in the Northeastern Province of Misiones of Argentina. Based on sociolinguistic field interviews with 25 consultants possessing varying degrees of proficiency in the language, we show that this variant of heritage German does in fact occasionally…

This polity study is about the language policy situation in the People's Republic of China (China) with a focus on one official minority language, Zhuang. The paper offers an examination of the language policy and planning (LPP) framework nationally as it relates to official minority languages, and regionally as it relates to the Zhuang minority…

The views that gender and language are related each other has been reviewed from at least two different disciplines: sociolinguistics and psychology. From the first discipline, it has been concluded that gender and language has no natural relationship for it is cultural values that shape genderlect. From the second discipline, it has been…

This article attempts to apply some systemic functional linguistic (SFL) concepts to task-based language teaching (TBLT) as a means of enriching the fields of learning, teaching, and evaluating writing in an additional language. The purposes are twofold. First, this article presents a concrete example concerning SFL-initiated genre-based tasks,…

Background: The casual, abbreviated writing style sometimes known as "textese" (e.g., sorry im late ?) has become widespread with the rise of digital communication. We explored Australian university students' views on, and use of, textese across three modalities (text message, Facebook post, email) and three recipient types (friends,…

This paper shares the voices of six teachers regarding two language awareness projects carried out in one pre-primary and one primary school in Portugal. These projects present innovative practices in teaching young and very young learners to reflect upon language and linguistic diversity and to become aware of world issues (e.g. poverty,…

This paper examines how in-service teachers enrolled in an MA in TESOL program demonstrated critical language awareness (CLA) as they designed and implemented ethnographic action research projects anchored in funds of knowledge. The action research project aimed to introduce teachers to school-based ethnographic research and to provide an…

Language problems and language barriers are challenges facing not only immigrants but also minorities and people in rural/semirural areas. This study examines individuals' bi- and multilingual repertoires, language practices and attitudes in a Hokkien-speaking community in Kangar, a semirural town of northern Malaysia bordering Thailand. Through…

Disparities in school discipline data indicate that children of color, particularly boys, receive more frequent and harsher disciplinary actions than their white peers, and this begins in early schooling. Within today's print-centered, bodily restricted school curricula, literacy instruction is often reduced to highly controlled, leveled readers…

What resources do students draw on to produce literary theory in the contemporary high school English classroom? This interactional sociolinguistic study traces the production and distribution of Lexical, Structural, and Thematic resources across genre chains in reading, writing, and discussing literary theory during an intensive 3-week short…

The present study investigated the production of the speech act of disagreement among Tunisian non-native students of English and American native speakers of English. Discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit disagreement strategies by the informants. Non-native informants produced a total of 376 acts and native informants produced 395…