This book contributes to understanding research approaches for studying multilingualism in the context of contemporary superdiversity, in environments that are being dramatically transformed by transnational migration and movement of peoples. It explores language in urban contexts: the city as a site for experimentation and creativity in language…

Rising enrollments of students for whom English is not a first language mean that every teacher -- whether teaching kindergarten or high school algebra -- is a language teacher. This book explains what teachers need to know about language in order to be more effective in the classroom, and it shows how teacher education might help them gain that…

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

The essays in this volume are divided into four sections: (1) "Ethnic Diversity and National Language," (2) "Bilingualism: Its Causes and Consequences," (3) "Models and Methods," and (4) "Language Spread: A New Direction," The first part deals with the social conditions that influence acquisition of a second…

Ethnoscience studies, and studies of color vocabulary in particular, have firmly established that to understand the full range of meaning of a word in any language, each new language must be approached on its own terms, without a priori theories of semantic universals. It has been shown that color words in fact encode a great deal of…

This workbook for students provides an accessible introduction to a range of ways of analyzing language in context. The workbook can be used in a number of ways, for example, as a student reference text to briefly review a particular kind of language analysis or as a course textbook to introduce students to a variety of approaches to language data…

This volume is an attempt to provide the sociology of language with the basic teaching-learning tools needed in order to facilitate its academic growth and consolidation. It provides the students and specialist in language planning with a comprehensive anthology of articles dealing with this area of research in the sociology of language. The…

Essays on the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) include: an introduction to the evolution of AAVE within the African American diaspora (Shana Poplack); "Rephrasing the Copula: Contraction and Zero in Early African American English" (James A. Walker); "Reconstructing the Source of Early African American English…

This study attempts to do the following things: (1) to identify values and assumptions as they influence research on bilingual education; (2) to identify and delineate the major theories employed in explaining and predicting phenomena in bilingual education; and (3) to explore alternative explanations of identical phenomena, and to show that…

This collection of 10 reports focuses on research in the area of language and understanding, with emphasis on the effects of such research on language teaching and applied linguistics. The reports address issues in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, second language acquisition, syntax, text linguistics, language testing, and sociolinguistics. The…

A study is presented which attempts to clarify the notion of communicative proficiency in a foreign language and which outlines an instructional model that incorporates the insights of the study. Communicative proficiency is defined as fluent mastery of the foreign language in different contexts. The definition was operationalized into discourse…

Offering a comprehensive review of Australian research directed toward the study of the language use of children from different social backgrounds, this book assesses the validity of Basil Bernstein's thesis that many lower working class children are confined to a restricted code of language use. This evaluation is set in two wider contexts: what…

This book is about the prospect of a social turn in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), in particular, that part of SLA that is devoted to the input-interaction-output (IIO) model. The book is intended to critically examine some of the basic notions and assumptions that underpin this model and to suggest a more interdisciplinary and…

A non-structural model is proposed for quantifying and analyzing the dynamics of language attrition, particularly among immigrants in a second language environment, based on examination of disfluencies (hesitations, errors, and repairs). The first chapter discusses limitations of the conventional synchronic textual approach to analyzing language…