The purpose of this article is to re-conceptualize the role of the monolingual teacher in mainstream K-12 classrooms in the United States who work with students who are mostly multilingual and transnational. The proposed role for monolingual teachers is to incorporate at least some of the resources available in students' native languages, even if…

A growing number of scholars invested in Iberian Studies are asking how peninsular literary and cultural studies might be reimagined, and reinvigorated, by placing the Spanish and Portuguese canons into critical dialogue with each other, and with Galician, Catalan, Basque/Euskadi, and Latin American and North African immigrant writers, cultural…

Purpose: This paper aims to outline the misguided underpinnings of the "word gap" concept promoted by Hart and Risley (1995). This concept posits that a "30 million word gap" between children of poverty and those from affluent households accounts for widespread academic disparities. Based on this premise, there has been a…

English has unquestionably become a global phenomenon, generating a fundamental discussion of EIL pedagogy for English language teaching practitioners around the world. Teaching English as an International Language captures this important moment in the history of English language teaching. Readers will find an accessible introduction to the past,…

Based on ethnographic research in a diverse New York City neighborhood, this article examines issues surrounding the practice of crossing from children's perspectives. Crossing refers to the use of language varieties to which one does not have conventional access, practices that could be disparaging or affiliative. The author explores how children…

This article aims at the feature analysis of four expository essays (Text A/B/C/D) written by secondary school students with a focus on the differences between spoken and written language. Texts C and D are better written compared with the other two (Texts A&B) which are considered more spoken in language using. The language features are…

This introduction to the symposium approaches the themes of autonomy and homogeneity in Canadian English from a historical perspective. We trace the debates on these topics back to the late 19th century and relate them to changing public attitudes toward Canadian linguistic autonomy over time. We review the scholarly evidence on autonomy and…

In today's transient world, where a continual multidirectional flow of people, goods, and services has deterritorialized languages and their users, languages, especially English, are now without borders. In this context, English language teaching (ELT) as a profession is called to a new task. In this article, I examine this task by asking the…

Linguistic diversity has always been and still is one of the current issues in the Norwegian educational system. Norwegian is the official language of the country, but, there have been several distinct dialects and two official written Norwegian languages in the country since 1885. One of them is "Bokmål" and the other is…

Maltese, the national language of Malta, is, without doubt, the dominant language of most Maltese in most domains of language use in Malta. It however shares official status with English, which is also in regular use. Most Maltese can, in fact, be said to be bilingual to differing degrees. This article begins by providing some background…

We discuss generalizability (G) theory and the fair and valid assessment of linguistic minorities, especially emergent bilinguals. G theory allows examination of the relationship between score variation and language variation (e.g., variation of proficiency across languages, language modes, and social contexts). Studies examining score variation…

Folk perceptions of language diversity often differ from the criteria laid out by linguists and have particular implications for applied/sociolinguists since the collective identification of language diversity largely determines the ways in which individuals regard the categorisation of their own (and others) linguistic uses as belonging to a…

A film script is a useful tool for allowing students to experiment with language variation. Scripts of love stories comprise a range of language contexts, each triggering a different style on a formal-neutral-informal linguistic continuum: (1) technical cinematographic language in camera directions; (2) narrative language in exposition of scenes,…

Introducing a pioneering series of studies of family language policy and management, this paper points out that classic language policy dealt almost entirely with the nation-state, although it did recognise the critical role of the family in determining natural intergenerational transmission of a variety. After arguing for the need to look at each…

This article examines certain aspects of the debate surrounding English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). It argues that in some ways, neither ELF nor its opponents have come to terms with the complexities of English in a globalized world. By defining ELF according to how it differs from native-speaker language use, ELF researchers have tended to…