Much of curriculum innovation in English language teaching in the context of former colonial countries has been derivative rather than generative, imitative rather than self-initiated or self-regulatory. This trend is in part the result of historical exigencies that made the importation of ELT approaches, methods, and techniques for classroom…

Studies of African naming practices focus almost exclusively on the meanings and etymology of names and details about the circumstances surrounding how such names are assigned. Such research has not examined the implications naming has for language planning, ideologies of language, and language shift. Focusing on names and naming practices in…

This paper uses a corpus approach to investigate disciplinary variation in the construction of stance using nouns which are followed by "that" and a complement clause, "e.g. the argument that the Justices exhibit strategic behaviour..." Two corpora of theses written in English are examined: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…

This paper reviews the research output on English language education in China published in 24 international journals from 2001 to 2006 and delineates the nature of this corpus of research. The review covers research in the following areas: the linguistic situations and culture of learning in China in relation to English language education,…

The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom conversations about diverse dialects of English can provide a useful foundation for critical language and literacy instruction for students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and other stigmatized dialects. This article describes a weeklong unit on language variety that…

Linguistically, political discourses have generally been discussed within qualitative approaches (e.g., Blackledge, 2005; Chilton, 2004; Chomsky, 2004; van Dijk, 2005; Wodak, 2002). This paper presents tools to design a quantitative research relating political speech with sociolinguistic variables. Notions such as Accommodation Theory (Giles &…

This paper documents the occurrence of form variability through diminutive "wordplay", and examines whether this variability facilitates or hinders morphology acquisition in a richly inflected language. First, in a longitudinal speech corpus of eight Russian mothers conversing with their children (1.6-3.6), and with an adult, the use of diminutive…

This paper examines the ways in which Latino children's literature portrays cultural models of bilingualism and identity affiliations based on language and cultural practices. We focus attention on the messages in seven children's books about practices of and attitudes toward Spanglish, standard Spanish, and individual and societal bilingualism.…

The author shares findings from a qualitative study of white, monolingual preservice teachers enrolled in a sociolinguistics course that examines the interplay of language and ethnicity in the United States. The primary aims of the study were to learn more about the preservice teachers' awareness of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds and to…

English has gradually become the lingua franca of medical publications and conferences across Europe, with scholars from "smaller" languages opting for English because of the greater scientific impact and prestige associated with a wide international audience; at the same time, however, this transition has disrupted well-established textual…

This article offers a response to the comments and claims made in Jennifer Jenkins' article, "The spread of English as an International Language: a testing time for testers." It examines some assumptions underpinning her views and responds to claims about current policy and practice in English language testing. It goes on to explain the key…

Kachru (1988) and Sridhar and Sridhar (1992) argue that the spread of English as a world language increases the types of context in which English is learnt today. The sociolinguistic realities of world Englishes learners today challenge the validity of some second-language acquisition theories. One of the theoretical limitations of existing…

As the field of world language (WL) education continues to improve the integration of language and culture, educators must constantly question and challenge their assumptions of what culture is and how to weave it into language instruction. In fact, one of NNELL's position statements states that there is a need for a "cogent plan to provide…

A functional theory of semantics that accounts for idioms, rigid expressions, and language variability and indeterminacy is explored. The theory is based on the distinction between language as a natural, social phenomenon and linguistic systems as the constructions of linguists, and avoids the usual tendency of theory to assume that language is a…

This paper describes multiple Estonian-Russian language contacts in Estonia. For synchronic microsociolinguistic research it is usual to concentrate on the impact of a sociolinguistically dominant language A on an immigrant/minority language B. In the Soviet setting, the dominant language was usually Russian (despite Russians being a minority).…