This paper explores how referent honorifics contribute to identity construction on a Japanese TV shopping channel program. Drawing on Ochs' twostep model of indexicality (1993, 1996) and Agah's proposal (1993) that honorifics are not directly linked to social status but index a "relative position within events of discursive interaction"…

The role and functioning of schools are changing as well as what is expected of teachers (who face growing and diversified challenges); consequentially, well-being at the schools is endangered. As teachers and teachers' educators concern is: How to improve schools' and teachers' effectiveness and promote well-being. Believing that the path to…

At a time when political leaders and media pundits seek to narrow the English curriculum and reduce its knowledge structure to the "basics," it is helpful to revisit the potential of different approaches to learning in English that have evolved over time. In this paper I reflect on the semantic features of personal growth, cultural…

Speakers must command different linguistic registers to index various social-discourse elements, including the identity of the addressee. Previous work found that English-learning children could link registers to appropriate addressees by 5 years. Two experiments found that better cues to the linguistic form or to the social meaning of register…

Many young children of Mexican heritage enter U.S. schools with knowledge of two language systems and emergent biliterate abilities. Bilingualism in young children may go unnoticed when instructional practices favor English. This case study describes how Lucía's bilingualism and emergent biliteracy parallel competencies essential to literacy…

How can the education of teacher-researchers from China be framed in ways so that they might make Chinese learnable for primary and secondary school learners for whom English is their everyday language of instruction and communication. The concept "making Chinese learnable" and the characters of the language learners are explained in the…

Much of the debate regarding outcomes of various types of dual-language programs has focused on linguistic and academic results, and with good reason: improving the educational outcomes of language minorities and supporting societal multilingualism are vital goals. More rarely explored, however, are these programs' ethnolinguistic outcomes: the…

Folk perceptions of language diversity often differ from the criteria laid out by linguists and have particular implications for applied/sociolinguists since the collective identification of language diversity largely determines the ways in which individuals regard the categorisation of their own (and others) linguistic uses as belonging to a…

Romani media and language planning gained importance as a consequence of the political emancipation of the Roma, which is mainly based on the idea of a European Roma nation with its own culture and language. Meanwhile the study of Romani has developed from an exotic into a more or less established scientific field. However, with respect to media…

Reflecting on the contributions in this volume, this paper engages with the development of widespread concepts of literacy, and gradually moves towards a view in which different literacy systems are seen, and have to be seen, as relatively autonomous. The papers in this volume engage with such a relatively autonomous system, that of grassroots…

A film script is a useful tool for allowing students to experiment with language variation. Scripts of love stories comprise a range of language contexts, each triggering a different style on a formal-neutral-informal linguistic continuum: (1) technical cinematographic language in camera directions; (2) narrative language in exposition of scenes,…

In this article, we address how websites intended for ELA teachers encourage user participation and what kinds of English education these sites promote or exclude. We selected sites based on assumptions drawn from interactional sociolinguistics as well as additional criteria that developed during our search. Our analysis focuses on the George…

The need to recognise English language teaching (ELT) as a site for the interplay of cultural politics and competing discourses has been acknowledged in ELT literature. Writing as an English teacher in Japan, and not unfamiliar over the years with the confluencing of discourses whether relating to neoliberalism, globalisation or other forces…

In this paper I closely examine spontaneous interactions between members of a tri-generation Italian American family. I argue that members show different language preferences and differing attitudes towards the family's multilingual identity but that they all demonstrate a degree of "engagement" with the heritage language. Phenomena that…

Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. In its most benign and neutral definition, jargon signifies "the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group." More often, however, the jingly word that Chaucer used to describe "the inarticulate utterance of birds" takes…