This paper examines how Northern Thai (Muang) children are socialized into the discourses and practices of respect in school, a process that indexically links Standard Thai to images of polite and respectful Thai citizenship. Focusing on the socialization of politeness particles, the paper examines how cultural models of conduct are taken up,…

This paper examines the tensions created in a Greek Cypriot primary classroom between the legitimate variety of the school, Standard Modern Greek, and the home variety of the students, the Greek Cypriot Dialect. Ethnographic data are presented to indicate that language use in the classroom, contrary to what language policy-makers argue, is…

This volume brings together research carried out in a variety of geographic and linguistic contexts including Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States and explores efforts to incorporate linguistic diversity into education and to "harness" this diversity for learners' benefit. It challenges the largely…

In this unique collaboration, the authors bring to life the theory of mediated learning. Through numerous examples and scenarios from classrooms and museums, they show how mediated learning helps children to become more effective learners. Readers learn the steps in the process, including analyzing the child's problem, teaching the child to focus…

This article draws on a survey of 64 self-identified multilingual faculty from across the disciplines who currently teach with writing in English at the undergraduate and graduate level. The survey asked faculty about their linguistic experiences from childhood through the present and thus offers insights about the complexity of multilingual…

It is generally believed that study abroad (SA) is the most efficient and successful way to acquire proficiency in a second language (L2). SA is a crucial component of students' second language acquisition (SLA) process, for it puts them in situations in which they can use the language on a daily basis and interact with native speakers. More than…

This study investigates the case of 7 female heritage learners of Spanish who have chosen, as adults, to enroll in online Spanish language instruction at the postsecondary level. Drawing on symbolic convergence theory, it identifies a cultural fantasy metanarrative that participants collectively constructed as they made sense of their language…

This article suggests that English language teachers should consider all varieties of English, not just British Standard English or American Standard English. In order to better prepare students for the global world, and to show them that their own English is valued, teachers can implement a balanced approach that incorporates the teaching and…

This paper considers the real mother tongues of Singapore, namely the Chinese "dialects" and Singlish, the linguistic varieties which, respectively, arrived with the original immigrants to the rapidly developing British colony, and evolved in the dynamic multilingual ecology over the decades. Curiously these mother tongues have been…

The scientific community has traditionally considered technical English as neutral and objective, able to transmit ideas and research in simple sentences and specialized vocabulary. Nevertheless, global communication and intense information delivery have produced a range of different ways of knowledge transmission. Although technical English is…

This study aims to determine the attitudes toward Standard Spoken Tamil (SST) and Literary Tamil (LT) of 46 Tamil teachers in Singapore. The teachers' attitudes were used as an indicator of the acceptance or nonacceptance of SST as a viable option in the teaching of Tamil in the classroom, in which the focus has been largely on LT. The…

This paper takes up three topics for discussion. The first is whether the Kachruvian three-circle model can accommodate the possible change of English use (e.g. native/non-native to individual proficiency, a special talent to a basic skill). The second is what transformation English would undergo if it survives as English as an international…

It is probable that the majority of the 455 000 strong Aboriginal population of Australia speak some form of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) at least some of the time and that it is the first (and only) language of many Aboriginal children. This means their language is somewhere on a continuum ranging from something very close to Standard…

This article reports on the variable omission of the French negative particle "ne" (the first marker of verbal negation) in synchronous (i.e., real-time) electronic communication environments. Patterns of variation in a corpus of non-educational chat (i.e., free, public-access Internet chat) are analyzed and compared to data produced by first-,…

In some contact situations between Spanish and English there is an acceleration of the process of the extension of "estar" that may be due to lack of access to the formal written standard, features of English in particular or general processes of simplification that result from the cognitive demands of bilingualism (Silva-Corvalan,…