This article, part of a larger ethnographic study, examines how a family's affective ties to the country of origin and to relatives still residing there supported their Spanish language development and maintenance efforts in Vancouver, Canada. Drawing on data from participant observation and interviews, the article analyses the parents' diverse…

The development of speech-act theory has provided the hearers with a better understanding of what speakers intend to perform in the act of communication. One type of speech act is apologizing. When an action or utterance has resulted in an offense, the offender needs to apologize. In the present study, an attempt was made to compare the apology…

The main purpose of this study was to compare differences in approaches to teaching children's song by kindergarten teachers in Taiwan and the USA. Five public school kindergarten teachers in Taipei, Taiwan, and five public kindergarten teachers in Seattle, USA, were invited to voluntarily participate in this study. They were asked to teach six…

Urban college students (n=179) from diverse cultural backgrounds and regions received instruction in the writing of short narratives, or allegories, to express generalizations about human behavior. At the beginning of the three-month semester students were given samples of allegories concluding with a lesson and then were asked to create an…

The theory of planned behavior and the dual process attitude-to-behavior MODE model framed an examination of how White teachers' (N = 241) implicit and explicit attitudes toward White versus non-White students were related to their classroom instructional practices in 2 school districts with a high percentage of Arab American and Chaldean American…

Individual voices are not uniformly similar to others, even when factoring out speaker characteristics such as sex, age, dialect, and so on. Some speakers share common features and can cohere into groups based on gross vocal similarity but, to date, no attempt has been made to describe these features systematically or to generate a taxonomy based…

This study was an attempt to investigate the functional role of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English and Persian Economic news reports. To this end, 10 news articles, 5 in each language, were randomly selected from the Economic sections of the leading newspapers published in 2013-2014 in Iran and the United States. Based on…

Despite the turbulent political circumstances of the 1880s, and notwithstanding opposition from key government officials, this decade witnessed the Korean government's initial attempts to establish educational institutions modelled after western schools--the Royal College (Yugyeong Gongweon), a military academy (Yeonmu Gongweon), and an…

Academic writing requires both style and grammatical correctness; however, efforts in improving the quality of English academic writing by non-native students have been focused on grammar. Structures observed in this study were grammatically correct, but considered unnatural in academic writing genre. This research involves a group of non-native…

Adopting retrospective verbal report, or RVR as the instrument, this study reports an analysis of the perceptions of native-English-speaking (NES) and non-native-English-speaking (NNES) students, who apologised to their instructors in coursework-related situations. Sixty NESs from different levels and disciplinary areas and 63 NNESs (Arabic 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…

Heritage language (HL) is a linguistic system that arises in the context of early childhood bilingualism, both sequential and simultaneous, when one of the languages is not fully acquired. The performance of speech acts in HLs is yet to be understood, and this dissertation is a first step in this direction. The study investigates the pragmatic…

Global student mobility has become a dynamic force in American higher education. Integrating international students into diverse campus environments provides domestic as well as foreign students with enriched learning opportunities. However, a diverse campus climate itself will not make college students interculturally competent. Intentional…

The current study first examined the applicability of the ClassMaps Survey (CMS)--a measurement of resilience in classroom/school settings developed in the US with Chinese middle school students and then compared the group differences on student perceptions of the resilience factors in the CMS across the two cultures. The findings suggest that the…

This study was based on the view that collective conceptions of learners have intimate connections with both social and linguistic analysis and language education. It set out to examine systematically the perceptions of Chinese college students on English and English education against the background of both the increasing role of English in the…