LET'S SPEAK ENGLISH

Do Cajuns Speak Southern English? Morphosyntactic Evidence

Interrelationships of Willingness to Speak and Cultural Identity with English L2 Speaking Proficiency

Regarding the belief that willingness to communicate is strongly tied with developing some insights into the L2 culture, such a connection may not be always positive and the issue of cultural attachment and identity may sometimes function as a hindrance. Individuals are believed to be highly emotional in terms of “religion and spirituality", among other components of cultural identity. This stu...

Constructability of Trip-lets

A trip-let is an object as shown on the cover of Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: a solid, threedimensional object that, when viewed from three orthogonal directions, shows three different letters. In this paper we consider two problems related to the construction of such objects for a given set of three letters. First, we want to know whether the silhouettes of the object correspond to t...

On Desugaring Polymorphic Lets

Existing type literature has conflicting views on desugaring polymorphic lets to lambda terms. The conflict arises because, in certain cases, desugaring does not preserve typing. We describe a transformation of polymorphic lets to monomorphic lets such that, when the monomorphic lets are desugared, the typing is preserved. Our transformation requires no changes to either term or type syntax. Th...

Does my identity speak English? A pragmatic approach to the social world of an English language learner with language impairment.

The case description provides a comprehensive picture of the complex social and linguistic factors that shape the social identity of an English language learner with the additional challenge of language impairment (LI). These issues were explored over 6 months with Fernando, an 8-year-old, Spanish-speaking male with LI in grade 3. A pragmatic, or practical, approach to problem solving was devel...