Open Access

This study examines the use of Seychelles Creole (hereafter, Kreol Seselwa), and English as languages for testing knowledge in the Social Studies classroom of the Seychelles. The objective of the study was to ascertain whether the languages used in the test affected the pupils' academic performance. The paper is theoretically influenced by the Social Practice approach to writing (Street, 1984), challenging a monolingual (autonomous) approach in favour of a more multilingual (ideological) model which takes into account all the learners' language repertoires. A within groups experimental design was implemented, and 151 primary six pupils (11-12 years) from three different schools wrote a short test, in a counterbalanced design, in two languages. The topic of the test was fishing, mostly local contextual knowledge, taught in English. The tests were marked for content in both languages. The results showed that the scores on both languages highly correlated, indicating that both tests captured the same knowledge constructs. However, pupils achieved significantly higher marks in the tests written in Kreol Seselwa than in English. The study has implications for policymakers, teachers and most importantly learners in other multilingual settings, particularly in post-colonial countries like the Seychelles, where the mother tongue is undervalued in the classroom.

English has been introduced as the medium of instruction in three-quarters of Master's-degree programs in the Netherlands and one-quarter of Bachelor's degree programs. The principal driving force behind this trend is internationalization, with the harmonization and Anglicization of higher education applied as means to that end. There is increasing criticism of this development within educational institutions and the Dutch House of Representatives. The main criterion is that the use of English should not undermine the quality of the education provided. The required level of proficiency in English for teaching and receiving academic education is C1 of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference). For native speakers of Dutch (L1), both verbal information processing and text production in English (L2) burden the working memory more than their own language would Relatively little research has been conducted into the impact of English-medium instruction on the academic performance of Dutch students, and many of those studies that do exist are based on self-reporting rather than objective measurements. Semi-experimental research indicates that lecturers using L2 English are less clear, precise, redundant, and expressive, and also improvise less. Findings in respect of academic performance are inconsistent: some studies point to a decline, others find no effect on students' performance. Research into the impact of L2 as a medium of instruction is generally hindered by the non-random allocation of students to the language in which they are taught and a lack of objective measurements.

This article will begin by briefly outlining the long-standing, and contested, debate in Anglophone countries regarding the place of grammar in the L1 curriculum, and will underline how Anglophone countries in general have not valued grammar in the teaching of L1 (or in L2). It will illustrate how current national policies have re-positioned grammar, with particular reference to England and Australia, and it will review recent research which demonstrates that explicit grammar teaching can support learner outcomes in reading and writing. Drawing on a Hallidayan theoretical framework for grammar, which emphasises grammar as a semiotic resource for meaning-making, the article will offer a theorized rationale for the inclusion of grammar in the L1 curriculum. This argument will be evidenced with data from a series of related studies and will address a) linking grammar and the learning focus for reading or writing in a meaningful way; b) the role of talk in supporting the development of students' metalinguistic knowledge; c) students' conceptual understanding of grammatical terms; and d) the place of teachers' grammatical subject knowledge in supporting a meaning-rich approach to the teaching of grammar. The article will conclude by signaling key lines of enquiry for future research.

Intercultural communication occurs when people impacted by various cultural groups talk about similar meanings in their social interactions. It is considered as both a means to and a goal of English language teaching. Despite the wide scope of literature on the subject, few studies have investigated intercultural communication in L2 reading in the Iranian context. This article explored the attitudes of Iranian English students, instructors, policy-makers, and textbook developers toward intercultural communication as reflected in L2 reading textbooks. To this end, library data, questionnaire, and corpora were applied in a mixed-method study. The findings revealed a gap between the attitudes of academicians and policy-makers regarding intercultural communication in English reading textbooks; a gap deeply reflected in the themes and contents of the reading textbooks developed in public and private sectors in Iran. Results are discussed and implications are provided for ELT instructors, students, policy-makers, and textbook developers.

This cross-cultural project applies current theories in Cognitive Linguistics to the issue of youth (dis)engagement in the high school setting. Specifically, it analyses American and Polish youth speech from online forums and dictionaries according to five main categories: the institution of school, the place of school, the people of school, the activities of school and the emotions of school. The analysis presents these lexical expressions grouped according to metaphorical source domain in order to better understand how teenagers in each culture conceptualize SCHOOL. The discussion summarises the analysis for each country, whereas the conclusion compares the two and makes comments on the implication for theories of language and education. The aims of this paper are three-fold: to increase understanding of the ways in which youth view their time in the classroom, to provide a comparative analysis that will shed light on cultural differences in the conceptualization of SCHOOL and its linguistic expression, and to highlight examples of metaphors that value school and the educational process so that these conceptual mappings can receive more emphasis in both countries.