The issue of dialect and education and, in particular, the issue of which code to use as the medium of instruction has generated much heated debate in bidialectal societies. This debate is reflected in the literature on language policy in education which is divided into three main areas: (i) the use of the standard variety as medium of…

In this article, the author reflects on keywords in Statement Two of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) "Statements of Belief". The second statement says, "We believe students come to understand themselves and their work through engagement with a range of cultures and the ways these cultures represent…

Quantitative and qualitative data from two Irish-speaking communities in Ireland (F, a core community within the heartland of Irish-speaking Galway and B, a peripheral community on the edge of Galway city) are examined in order to investigate the role of location in language contact. The analysis of the observed linguistic outcomes based on…

Scholarship on dialect diversity in classrooms has yielded two seemingly incompatible lines of research. Although numerous pedagogical approaches have been shown to provide productive alternatives to traditional responses to stigmatized dialects, research on public perceptions and teachers' attitudes suggests that negative beliefs about…

Despite advancements in empirical studies of developmental dyslexia, progress on methods of dyslexia assessment have been hampered by ongoing debate concerning diverse issues such as the role and validity of IQ in the assessment process, labelling and definitions (Miles, 1994; Stanovich, 1991, 1992). With the emergence of cross-linguistic studies…

This paper suggests elements of an agenda for future sociolinguistics among minority groups, by seeing it as a mutual relationship that involves benefits to researcher and researched. We focus on two aspects of the relationship. One is the political, economic and social benefits that can accrue to a minority group as a result of the research.…

Kachru (1988) and Sridhar and Sridhar (1992) argue that the spread of English as a world language increases the types of context in which English is learnt today. The sociolinguistic realities of world Englishes learners today challenge the validity of some second-language acquisition theories. One of the theoretical limitations of existing…

(Text is in French.)

Definitions of literacy necessarily express a social relationship between self and other, projecting the way literate members of society wish to relate to those considered illiterate. This essay questions current definitions of the "illiterate other". (Author/LHW)

Newspeak, the engineered language of George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," is discussed in the context of Orwell's wider views on language and politics and the need for linguistic intervention as part of the struggle against tyranny, and the related or opposed ideas of some of Orwell's contemporaries and Saussure. Orwell worried…

This paper investigates the impact of English as an international language on the German language and society. Even though English has influenced German linguistically for many years, the growing importance of English as a global language, and the increasingly dominant lingua franca in Europe, has drastically increased the presence of English in…

Reports that the pattern of a faculty's social environment and the pronoun pattern of their speech are parallel. (Author/AJ)

Using the case of Serbo-Croatian linguistic terminology as an example, discusses some of the problems of standardizing vocabulary across two more more languages. (EKN)

Investigates the role of language in society from the theoretical framework of the sociology of knowledge. (EKN)