Drawing on critical pedagogy, this study challenges the hegemony of Standard English (SE) to promote inclusive approaches which recognise and tolerate the variation of World Englishes to prepare students for intercultural encounters with interlocutors speaking different varieties of English. To enhance students' ethno-sensitivity and receptive…

Though generally under-utilised in spoken English, the passive voice plays a crucial role in formal, written English (Biber et al., 1999). An understanding of how the passive voice operates in English writing is therefore a vital skill for EFL learners in secondary and higher education so that they may be able to both understand and produce fluent…

One of the fundamental ways in which knowledge develops is through contrast. This applies not only to the development of ideas and theories in argumentative texts, but also to the contrasting of new findings with old in experimental reports. Contrast, then, is central to the development of academic knowledge. A common finding in contrastive…

It is now commonly accepted that academic discourses tend to provide venues for participants to interact where the producer needs to display an awareness of the audience, and metadiscourse (MD) is the set of tools enabling the involved parties to establish relationships. MD strategies allow writers to project themselves into their work, signal…

This dissertation explores the main question, "What are the issues involved in the definition and translation of color terms in dictionaries?" To answer this question, I examined color term definitions in monolingual dictionaries of French and English, and color term translations in bilingual dictionaries of French paired with nine…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

This article describes the European Portuguese MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms, the first published instruments for the assessment of language development in EP-learning infants and toddlers. Normative data from the EP population are presented, focusing on developmental trends for vocabulary learning, production…

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in "increments" among students of conversational interaction. This article first outlines "incrementing" as an analytical problem (i.e., as turn constructional unit [TCU] extensions) by tracing its origins back to Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's (1974) famous turn-taking article. Then, the article…

Much of what is known about the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in second language Spanish is based on studies of English-speaking learners. This body of research has demonstrated common pathways in the acquisition of multiple variable structures, as well as how second language learners come to use (or not) Spanish in linguistically and…

Central America, including El Salvador, has been cited as the least studied of the Spanish-language dialect zones. The paucity of linguistic research extends to the language use of these populations in the United States, including that of Salvadorans who have relocated there. This paper analyzes Salvadorans' utilization of "voseo" and…

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector "thus" in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary…

What are the sources of variation in the input, and how much do they matter for language acquisition? This study examines frequency variation in manner-of-articulation classes in child and adult input. The null hypothesis is that segmental frequency distributions of language varieties are unigram (modelable by stationary, ergodic processes), and…

We investigate the extent to which language versions (English, French and Arabic) of the same science test are comparable in terms of item difficulty and demands. We argue that language is an inextricable part of the scientific literacy construct, be it intended or not by the examiner. This argument has considerable implications on methodologies…

"Although" is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners' "although" output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners' "although" employment in Chinese EFL learners' writing. The…

The dative alternation refers to the alternation between two constructions that denote some type of transfer: the double object construction ("I give my sister a book") vs. the to-dative construction ("I give a book to my sister"). We examined the motivations behind the dative alternation in Indian English. A corpus study was…