This article will reflect on the risks of a careless application of "safe-talk", a fruitful analytical concept that has been widely used in classroom discourse studies to link chorus-like repetition sequences with certain institutional and social processes related to either post-colonialism or migration. The discussion will draw on a…

This study examined abstracts for a British Association for Applied Linguistics conference and a Sociolinguistics Symposium, to define the genre of conference abstracts in terms of vague language, specifically universal general nouns (e.g. people) and research general nouns (e.g. results), and to discover if the language used reflected the level…

Hollywood movies have been a prime site for the representation of intercultural and multilingual encounters for decades. As such, they are not only of interest to everyday cinemagoers or home viewers, but have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, including socio-linguistics. A main focus of much previous work,…

An invitation to integrate macro and micro level analyses has been extended to researchers as this integration is felt to be the way forward for language policy research (Ricento, Ideology, politics and language policies: Focus on english, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2000). In turn, the notion of 'micro' in language policy has been specified as…

The role and functioning of schools are changing as well as what is expected of teachers (who face growing and diversified challenges); consequentially, well-being at the schools is endangered. As teachers and teachers' educators concern is: How to improve schools' and teachers' effectiveness and promote well-being. Believing that the path to…

How can the education of teacher-researchers from China be framed in ways so that they might make Chinese learnable for primary and secondary school learners for whom English is their everyday language of instruction and communication. The concept "making Chinese learnable" and the characters of the language learners are explained in the…

Romani media and language planning gained importance as a consequence of the political emancipation of the Roma, which is mainly based on the idea of a European Roma nation with its own culture and language. Meanwhile the study of Romani has developed from an exotic into a more or less established scientific field. However, with respect to media…

In this article, we address how websites intended for ELA teachers encourage user participation and what kinds of English education these sites promote or exclude. We selected sites based on assumptions drawn from interactional sociolinguistics as well as additional criteria that developed during our search. Our analysis focuses on the George…

This presentation builds on the concept of orientations to languages other than English in the US first suggested by Ruiz (1984). Using examples from recent ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and policy-related investigations undertaken principally in North America, the discussion explores possible connections between individual and group language…

This study investigates the pronunciation of English among Norwegian adolescents by applying sociolinguistic methods in a second language context. Results from an auditory analysis of seven phonological variables show a blended use of linguistic features from American English and British English, with some additional pronunciations, forming a…

It is generally accepted that second language (L2) acquisition becomes more difficult as one grows older and that success in adult L2 acquisition is highly variable. Nevertheless, humans in language contact situations have to cope with intergroup communication. This article examines the ways society has responded to this challenge. It describes…

Language-in-education policy in Ghana has been in a flux since British colonial rule but particularly so after independence. A close examination of post independence language in education policies shows these fluctuating policies have moved from one form of bilingual education policy to another. Many tensions and paradoxes that arise from…

Reflective skills are widely regarded as a means of improving students' lifelong learning and professional practice in higher education (Rogers 2001). While the value of reflective practice is widely accepted in educational circles, a critical issue is that reflective writing is complex, and has high rhetorical demands, making it difficult to…

Ethnolinguistic vitality theory asserts that Status, Demographic, Institutional Support and Control factors make up the vitality of ethnolinguistic groups. An assessment of a group's strengths and weaknesses in each of these dimensions provides a rough classification of ethnolinguistic groups into those having low, medium, or high vitality. Low…

The major objective of the study is to develop a framework allowing for the systematic investigation of the institutionalised varieties and performance varieties of English (also known as learner Englishes). This involves a detailed description of the forms of English spoken in India and in Russia as well as discussion of sociolinguistic histories…