This article examines multilingual interactions in the complementary school classroom for ethnic Chinese children in the UK. Through a detailed analysis of classroom exchanges amongst the children and their teachers, the study aims to demonstrate how they alternate between different varieties of Chinese and English and different modes of…

As part of the "Bridging the Language Gap" project undertaken with 86 State and Catholic schools across Queensland, the language competencies of Indigenous students have been found to be "invisible" in several key and self-reinforcing ways in school system data. A proliferation of inaccurate, illogical and incomplete data…

Aboriginal English has been documented in widely separated parts of Australia and, despite some stylistic and regional variation, is remarkably consistent across the continent, and provides a vehicle for the common expression of Aboriginal identity. There is, however, some indeterminacy in the way in which the term is used in much academic and…

British Sign Language has a number of regional variations. This article examines the role of residential schools in the development of sign variants. Citing data collected during interviews with members of the Lancaster and Morecambe Deaf community (who of necessity attended schools elsewhere), it explores the peer-to-peer transmission of sign…

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from…

Due to the recent shift in the linguistic pragmatics literature from the analysis of isolated speech acts to the focus on phenomena which affect the global meaning of a message, discourse markers (DMs) have become a frequent research topic. Despite their popularity, the evolution and development of these forms is often neglected in investigations…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…

In conversations between immigrants and officials, problems of understanding are often noticeable. About 280 recordings realised at the Argentine Aliens' Department and at several public authorities in Germany show that knowledge divergences regarding linguistic, cultural and institutional knowledge result in (sometimes grave) difficulties of…

The basic questions that a scholar interested in the study of language asks are concerned with language structure, acquisition, and change. William Labov is a linguist who has deeply influenced the linguistic scene in the past 60 years. It is to Labov's credit that he showed, backed by solid evidence, that the questions concerning language change,…

This paper examines the divergences between what educational policy calls for in South African schools with regard to language and learning and what takes place in schools. It argues that South African constitutional and education policy statements employ an idea of languages as bound entities and systems, and combine this understanding of…

As part of the attempts to revitalise Corsican, a regional language of France, and to reverse the language shift to French, language activists and academics have sought to apply the model of a polynomic language to what is considered as one language, but what is, in fact, a number of different Corsicans, each with varying levels of mutual…

This paper makes an instrumental analysis of English vowel monophthongs produced by 47 female Malaysian speakers. The focus is on the distribution of Malaysian English vowels in the vowel space, and the extent to which there is phonetic contrast between traditionally paired vowels. The results indicate that, like neighbouring varieties of English,…

This article explores the microgenetic development of learners' understanding of sociolinguistic variation in French during an instructional conversation (IC) that followed a language analysis task in which learners attempted to formulate hypotheses about the nature of language variation. During the IC, the instructor led students toward a…

The author analyses tendencies presented in recently launched EU reports claiming that newly published data reveal a need to rethink approaches to individual and social multilingualism. In the first part of the article approaches to individual as well as to societal multilingualism are discussed from a historical perspective. In the second part…

Since the 1980s the field of language teaching and learning has emphasised the interplay between language, culture and identity and promotes both communicative and intercultural competencies. This mirrors a general trend in the social sciences after the so-called "cultural turn" which brought about a concentration on culture, identity…