I've never done such a thing before in my life, to behonest" (August 2). Nilanga also reported that prior to the project he"was having zero exposure with these foreign people," aside from anoccasional tourist (August 11). Although a few of the more privilegedstudents had already had experience with inner circle cultures, andreported feeling comfortable with the interactions because of it, manyof the students lived in remote locations and found foreign travel rela-tively inaccessible. As with similar online intercultural learning projects(Chen, Hsu, & Caropreso, 2006), providing an opportunity for this newcommunicative experience

or 25 years I couldn't get such a chance in my career" (Au

t least some of the New York students also oriented to the experi-ence as something novel, despite many of them living deeply transna-tional lives shaped by immigration, travel, and regular cross-culturalcommunication. Louisa, the student born in Guatemala, wrote in oneforum post that for her "it will be the first time interacting with inter-national students." When asked about this post in an interview, sheresponded that this was her first time to have "correspondence withsomeone outside of New York in a school setting." Similarly, Niadescribed the project as "honestly pretty exciting" because she had"never communicated" with students "on an international level wherethey're pretty much on the other side of the world." Like the Sri Lan-kan students, some New York students saw the project as a rare oppor-tunity to communicate with "foreign people," constructing the SriLankan students as both culturally and linguistically other. For manyof the students, the project opened up possibilities to articulate andconfront their expectations of "foreign"

Although internet access is more accessible than international travel, it is far from uni-versal. Multiple students reported difficulties accessing the websites because of slow orinconsistent internet access, sometimes due to inconsistent electricity. These opportuni-ties for intercultural communication, and their educational benefits,

his multimodalexchange, the critical discussions of the local language varieties andthe sharing of linguistic landscape images acted as an eye-opener t

he New York students' introductory videos also tended to highlighttheir multilingualism. Several students told stories of family immigra-tion: Mariana and Louisa described how their families had come toNew York from the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, respectively,explaining that though they had lived in the United States from youngages and felt most comfortable in English, they still spoke Spanish withtheir families. Another student, Xing, codeswitched in his video, intro-ducing himself first in Mandarin and then in English, before describ-ing how he and his parents had immigrated from China when he was12. Ester described herself as a Haitian American who spoke both Eng-lish and Haitian Creole. S

n education, digital spaces can support both identity work and thequestioning of cultural assumptions, in part because school-basedonline work creates a temporary community in which students are bothanonymous (physically distant from their classmates) and known (mem-bers of a shared community; .

For at least some students, this marked the beginning of a shiftaway from an identity as a speaker of flawed or limited English towardthat of competent user of English

inally, these activities should be built into anoverall curriculum aimed at raising awareness of native speakerismand its effects in ELT, which might include readings that problema-tize native-nonnative binaries or analysis of teacher recruitmentmaterials (Kiczkowiak et al., 2016)

The privileging of native speakers and Western pedagogical meth-ods has long been critiqued by scholars (Canagarajah, 1999; Mahboob,2010; Phillipson, 1992; Widdowson, 1994), and a large body of work infields such as English as a lingua franca (ELF; Jenkins, 2011; Seidl-hofer, 2011) has demonstrated how language use outside the class-room has shifted away from dependence on native speaker norms.

However,where lecturers use oral presentations and reflective journals to assess aspects of students'learning, analysis of the data from this small-scale investigation suggests that bilingual andmultilingual students may benefit from opportunities to codeswitch.

If pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes were to include opportu-nities for teachers to speak and write reflectively in their languages of choice, researchwhich investigates whether or not using more than one language results in more detailedand more critical reflections could then be undertaken

The responses of these ten teachers suggest that permitting teachers to codeswitch inteacher education assignments which aim to assess teachers' reflexive competence may addto the quantity and quality of their spoken or written contributions

n hisdiscussion of reasons for codeswitching Grosjean (1982: 153±4) includes examples ofcodeswitching to emphasise a point or to conclude an argument. The use of English for thefinal statement in this speaking turn could be an example of an emphatic conclusion.

In discussing language and culture, Fantini (1991: 110±11) argues that inany language the words a person uses reflect the way he or she categorises experiences:within a particular culture, experiences are structured in a particular way and encoded intowords. He suggests that for the bilingual, use of two languages `provides access to differentvisions' of the same world.

This article describes and discusses asmall-scale investigation of the preferred language(s) of reflection of a group of teacherswho were students in the University of the Witwatersrand's flexible learning B Edprogramme at the time of the investigation

Dialectal variation providesonly a single piece of the complete picture, which must beviewed in context to better understand achievement gapsobserved between African American and Caucasian students

Althoughall individuals speak a dialect, some American dialects otherthan Generalized American English (GAE; also called Stan-dardized American English or Mainstream American En-glish) have been discriminatorily stigmatized as “inferior”language systems

The overall purpose of this article was to evaluatethe relation between African American students’ density ofAAE-specific forms in writing and their reading achieve-ment, while accounting for socioeconomic status and dialect-neutral writing skills

ally, we encourage continued examination of dialect-neutral forms across nonmainstream dialects. Although notwithin the scope of this article, specification of which linguis-tic forms maximally predict students’ long-term languageand reading abilities may be a key area for future work

substantially contribute to predicting students’ performanceon the measures of academic achievement when accountingfor household income, writing productivity, and dialect-neutral forms. Rather, the density of forms considered tobe ungrammatical both in AAE and standardized writtenGAE (i.e., M-Neutral) emerged as the most consistentsignificant predictor of students’ scores on standardizedachievement measures