When teachers work with students to construct a metalanguage that they can draw on to describe and analyze graphic novels, and then invite students to apply that metalanguage in the service of composing multimodal texts of their own, teachers broaden students' analytical frameworks. In the process of doing so, teachers empower students. In this…

Dialogue might be the most appropriate medium for reflections on translingualism. In a dialogue conducted by email over the course of ten days, Steven G. Kellman and Ilan Stavans consider the validity and implications of linguistic determinism. Their conversation examines whether some words that seem to embody the unique "Weltanschaaung"…

This article presents the experiences of six bilingual Spanish-English students transitioning from high school to college, highlighting the ways they theorize translation and its relationship to writing and learning. As increased attention to theories of translingualism has established translation as deeply embedded in writing processes, and…

Transitions in ESL contexts generally refer to those linking words placed between sentences and between paragraphs. Transitions in writing (and in speaking) are helpful; they facilitate coherence and cohesion when used correctly. Understanding them when reading allows us to join the writer in seeing why and how idea B follows idea A. In this…

In this article, the author reflects on keynotes by Debra Myhill and Wayne Sawyer in a search for ways with grammar. One of the keynote speakers, Debra Myhill, shared her research into teaching grammar that she had conducted in the UK. Myhill had asked a sample of teachers to follow a specified unit plan and had conducted pre- and post-testing to…

The relationship between cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, and composition has been a topic that has received much attention in rhetoric and composition's disciplinary conversations, even if current pedagogical practices used to address these matters lag behind in progress. In this essay, the author focuses on how to address linguistic…

English-Language Learners (ELLs, English-Learners, ELs) are a particularly challenging sector of the student population in United States schools. They constitute an increasingly larger presence in most school districts, growing 51 percent in ten years to 5.1 million in 2006. Despite becoming more common, schools have yet to figure out ways to meet…

The "language-culture tesseract" hypothesized in the September 2010 issue of "Mind, Brain, and Education" suggests successive links between non-native language (NNL) acquisition, the development of cross-cultural empathy, and prosocial global ethics. Invoking Goethe's (1833/1999) aphorism, "those who do not know other languages know nothing of…

On December 18, 1996, a controversial resolution was passed by the Board of Education of Oakland, California that recognized the legitimacy and significance of Ebonics in the cultural lives and in the education of African American children. The resolution, which was eventually amended, particularly around the implications that Ebonics was a…

Study abroad is often referred to, first and foremost, as an intercultural experience during which "cultures" are encountered and for which mobile students should be prepared. This article, which is based on research carried out on various aspects of student mobility in Europe, and more precisely in Finland, aims to go beyond the…

Newspeak, the engineered language of George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," is discussed in the context of Orwell's wider views on language and politics and the need for linguistic intervention as part of the struggle against tyranny, and the related or opposed ideas of some of Orwell's contemporaries and Saussure. Orwell worried…

Examines Olson' hypothesis that literacy, by allowing development of explicit prose, the differentiation of data from interpretation, and the growth of metalanguage, has altered human cognition and made modern, scientific thought possible. It is argued that this proposal lacks sufficient evidence, substance and coherence to support a case for any…

Discusses how a theory of language development must explain what develops and how development proceeds. Explaining what develops involves creating sequential theories of developing competence that converge to an adult theory, and explaining how development proceeds involves creating theories of the mechanisms of change responsible for movement…

Argues the need to develop students' and their teachers critical awareness of literature as a discipline, training its subjects in ways of reading, writing and talking about their own experiences and the worlds they inhabit in terms that may be detrimental to their own best interests. (Author/VWL)

Analyzes positions adopted in S. Borg's "Language Awareness as Methodology" published in this journal in 1994, from the points of view of linguistics and the philosophy of science. The article argues that some attitudes in language awareness are inconsistent with fundamental thinking in linguistics and the philosophy of science. (13…