Nonnative English speakers (NNESs) who teach at English-medium institutions in the United States (US) have frequently been the subject of student complaints. Research into language ideologies concerning NNESs in the US suggests that such complaints can be understood as manifestations of a broader project of social exclusion operating, in part, through the ideological construction of the NNES as incomprehensible Other. The present study explores the extent to which such ideological presuppositions and exaggerative performances are observable in students' evaluations of ‘Asian’ mathematics instructors on the website RateMyProfessors.com (RMP). A mixed methodological approach combining statistical analysis of numeric RMP ratings, quantitative corpus linguistic techniques, and critical discourse analysis was employed. Findings confirm the presence of disadvantages related to ‘Asian’ instructors' race and language. However, RMP users' discourse is shown to be less overtly discriminatory and instead to reproduce dominant language ideology in subtle, previously undescribed ways.(Student evaluations, higher education, university teaching, nonnative speakers, second language users, ethnicity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, formulaic language)*

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The Seal of Biliteracy is as an initiative to incentivize and credentialize bi‐/multilingualism in K–12 education in the United States. While it has been widely celebrated as a positive development in U.S. educational language policy, it is important to consider to what extent marginalized students benefit from this initiative. This critical policy analysis explores possible inequities in the way that the Seal has been promoted, enacted in policy, and implemented in schools, focused primarily on California. Three findings are reported. First, advocates and policy makers have constructed the purpose of the Seal as primarily aimed at promoting foreign or world language education, raising questions about the degree to which the recognition of language‐minoritized students’ linguistic repertoires is a focus. Second, the policy requirements for demonstrating biliteracy advantage students, especially native English‐speaking students, who are studying a foreign or world language as part of their school's curriculum. Third, schools with high percentages of students of color and students from low‐income families are less likely to participate in the program, suggesting that students privileged along lines of race and class have greater access to the program. This article concludes by suggesting improvements in policy and directions for future research that might contribute to addressing these inequities.

Second language pronunciation research and teaching relies on human listeners to assess second language speakers’ performance. Most applied linguists working in this area have been satisfied that listener ratings are reasonably reliable when well‐controlled research protocols are implemented. We argue, however, that listeners demonstrate a certain amount of reliability in their ratings of speakers stemming from shared expectations of a speaker's language and social groups, rather than from the speech itself. In this article, we discuss evidence from perceptual psychology, sociolinguistics, and phonetics demonstrating a sizable listener influence on speech perception. We conclude by suggesting ways for research and teaching to acknowledge and contend with the role of the listener.

This study examines frequency, contextual diversity, and contextual distinctiveness effects in predicting produced versus not-produced frequent nouns and verbs by early second language (L2) learners of English. The study analyzes whether word frequency is the strongest predictor of early L2 word production independent of contextual diversity and distinctiveness and whether differences exist in the lexical properties of nouns and verbs that can help explain beginning-level L2 word production. The study uses machine learning algorithms to develop models that predict produced and unproduced words in L2 oral discourse. The results demonstrate that word frequency is the strongest classifier of whether a noun is produced or not produced in beginning L2 oral discourse, whereas contextual diversity is the strongest classifier of whether a verb is produced or not produced. Post hoc tests reveal that nouns are more concrete, meaningful, imageable, specific, and unambiguous than verbs, which indicates that lexical properties may explain differences in noun and verb production. Thus, whereas distributional properties of nouns may allow lexical acquisition on the basis of association through exposure alone (i.e., nouns may adhere to frequency effects), the abstractness and ambiguity found in verbs make them difficult to acquire based solely on repetition. Therefore, verb acquisition may follow a principle of likely need characterized by contextual diversity effects.