This introduction to the symposium approaches the themes of autonomy and homogeneity in Canadian English from a historical perspective. We trace the debates on these topics back to the late 19th century and relate them to changing public attitudes toward Canadian linguistic autonomy over time. We review the scholarly evidence on autonomy and…

In the editorial of "The Language Learning Journal" of July 2011, readers' attention is drawn to the decline in language teaching and learning in British schools and universities, and to the attempt of the British Academy to promote language teaching against this decline. The British Academy paper makes seven recommendations of which the…

This survey of American and Chinese students at a state university in the southern United States measures Social Media (SM) use and attitudes toward SM. The purpose of this study was to investigate student perception and motivation of social media communication and the relationship between student cultural values and their social media…

Introduction: Cyberbullying has received a considerable amount of attention within the academic and public literature. However, very little if any cyberbullying research has been conducted among Arab American students. This current study explored the impact of cyberbullying among middle and high school Arab American students on their self-esteem…

Despite the huge popularity of YouTube, there has been little research into the factors affecting educational applications of this social medium. This study attempts to predict and compare factors influencing YouTube acceptance among university students and educators in two very different cultures, Japan and the USA, applying the Unified Theory of…

This study reports the development of a scale to evaluate the speech act performance by intermediate-level Chinese learners of English. A qualitative analysis of the American raters' comments was conducted on learner scripts in response to a total of 16 apology and request written discourse completion task (WDCT) situations. The results showed…

This paper addresses the issue of the emergence of new standards of English in the postcolonial world by means of a language attitude study conducted in the Caribbean island of Trinidad that involved rating the accents of newscasters. Accents represented in the clips played to respondents comprised various local as well as non-local ones. The…

The 1983 Review of the Family Services Act (1973) and the Advisory Council meetings in Saskatchewan should be viewed against the backdrop of political changes taking place in North American society. Beginning with decolonization movements in both Canada and the United States, control over the provision of child and family services to indigenous…

Developmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder and specific language impairment, are biologically based disorders that currently rely on behaviorally defined criteria for diagnosis and treatment. Specific behaviors that are included in diagnostic frameworks and the point at which individual differences in behavior constitute abnormality…

Understanding teaching as a political act is often assumed to be a strength for teachers; however, this assumption conceals important aspects of their processes of becoming politicized. I argue that seeing teaching as a political act can be a liability for prospective teachers of color who engaged with college student activism if these assumed…

Study abroad is an under-researched domain of language learning. Moreover, most investigations of this phenomenon adopt traditional structuralist approaches, wherein outcomes of study abroad are assessed solely in terms of proficiency gains as measured through conventional exams. The present study builds upon an emerging body of poststructuralist…

There is an emergent literature suggesting that East Asians and Westerners differ in cognitive processes because of cultural biases to process information holistically (East Asians) or analytically (Westerners). To evaluate the possibility that such differences are accompanied by differences in brain structure, we conducted a large comparative…

In addition to examining musical practices of students' cultural heritages, general music educators can teach the value and meaning of music in their own lives by finding ways to integrate a particular "foreign" music into their own experience. Moving from a cultural outsider to more of an insider is illustrated through tales of the…

This study investigates the influence of linguistic experience on the perception of pathologically-disordered voices using 18 listeners of American English, which has allophonic breathiness, 12 listeners of Gujarati, which contrasts breathy and modal vowels, and 18 listeners of Spanish, which has neither allophonic nor phonemic breathiness.…

As educators of foreign and second languages debate the most efficient methods of implementing pragmatic instruction in the L2 classroom, is it possible that Spanish pragmatic instruction is not necessary if American Spanish pragmatic norms are no different than American English norms? The present investigation studies the pragmatic norms in…