This article reviews the proliferation of terms that have been coined to denote the language environment of the young child. It is argued that terms are often deployed by researchers without due consideration of their appropriateness for particular empirical studies. It is further suggested that just three of the dozen or more available terms meet…

According to some accounts, the linguistic reality of stress-timing in English is questionable and the existence of this type of language rhythm is rejected as a perceptual illusion. In this article, the temporal characteristics of English are re-analysed in the light of current linguistic research, and a range of implications for pronunciation…

"Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics (CLP)" and its namesake field have accomplished a great deal in the last quarter of a century. The success of the journal parallels the growth and vitality of the field it represents. The markers of journal achievement are several, including increased number of journal pages published annually; greater diversity…

Second language study in French universities includes both modern language (literary) and foreign language (communicative) approaches, although teaching is dominated by the literary strand. Traditional educational models based on the transmission of knowledge are unable to accommodate recent progress in our understanding of learning theory, which…

New studies on how language learning occurs are beginning to chip away at some long-held notions about second-language acquisition and point to potential learning benefits for students who speak more than one language. New National Science Foundation-funded collaborations among educators, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and…

Calls from policymakers to assimilate immigrants through English literacy have grown urgent. Yet the 2007 U.S. Census has reported that one in five U.S. residents speaks a language other than English at home. What's more, new immigrants often settle in long-standing immigrant communities in which these non-English languages are the lingua franca.…

A colloquium presented at the Second Language Research Forum on 16 October 2008 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

What Aneta Pavlenko discusses in this fascinating article is so widely researched, so cogently conceptualized and so richly reflected upon, that one feels like a spoilsport to bring up a debate which the author herself claims to have avoided, namely the "universalist/relativist debate about basic emotions". If I do so in this Commentary, it is not…

This article presents an overview of the Arabic language in the United States. Drawing on archival research and statistical analysis, the article is divided into 4 major sections. The first discusses the history of immigration from the Arab world to the United States, as well as past efforts at Arabic language maintenance. The article continues…

Much research on world Englishes (WE) since the 1980s has yet to impact significantly upon recent applied linguistics work in the areas of instruction, curriculum, testing and policy. Much of the received wisdom has been informed by the paradigm established by the earlier study of International English (IE) and its attendant foci in teaching…

Currently, restrictive-language policies seem to threaten bilingual education throughout the USA. Anti-bilingual education initiatives have passed easily in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, while one was closely defeated in Colorado, and federal education policy has re-invigorated the focus on English education for English language…

Verbal engagement "plurality of meanings" is a very common linguistic phenomenon, and verbal participation occurs when a word has one meaning that is more common and more familiar than other meanings associated with the word that are less common. Because the phenomenon of verbal participation is one of the most important causes of…

Second language acquisition (SLA) research informed by sociocultural theory (henceforth, SCT) began in earnest with the publication of Frawley & Lantolf's (1985) article on L2 (second language) discourse (described in the timeline proper). Since then, well over 300 journal articles, book chapters and doctoral dissertations have appeared in the…

This paper explores the distance between documenting and revitalizing endangered languages and indicates critical points at which applied linguistics can play a role. We look at language documentation, language revitalization and their relationship. We then provide some examples from our own work. We see the lack of applied linguistics as a…

This paper postulates that having students engage in albeit limited and flawed research is a more effective way of changing attitudes than lecture or discussion. A common goal of the introductory linguistics course is to instill healthy language attitudes, but there is little extant research on the pedagogy of linguistics indicating how this may…