Asifa Sultana

• PhD
• Professor at BRAC University

Imposed political boundaries have an enormous impact on the communities. In this paper, we explore the status of an indigenous language in a region that has a long, shared history and culture. Focusing on two areas across a political border, i.e. Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, the paper examines the major language policies and practices of the...

In this paper, we tried to understand the status of the Marma language and identity in Bangladesh. Being an indigenous community in a country where Bengalis form a numerous as well as political majority, the Marmas in Bangladesh experience cultural and linguistic marginalisation. An added dimension of hegemony comes from the Chakmas who, arguably,...

More than 30 indigenous linguistic communities live in Bangladesh. Many of these languages are at risk of endangerment as the speakers see the functionality of their mother tongues diminish gradually. The purpose of the study is to examine the linguistic scenario of Kurukh, one of the indigenous languages spoken in the north-western parts of Bangla...

Language-specific assessment tools are a prerequisite to the valid identification of language disorders in any language. Linguistically-accurate tests appear to be limited in number in Bangladesh. In order to understand the current scenario with regard to language assessment, a review was conducted based on the research available on the internet....

The study is conducted in the two Bengals (Bangladesh and West Bengal, India) with their Kurukh-speaking communities. The aim is to understand the sociolinguistic aspects with regard to Kurukh, and examine the mother tongue based education scenario in the region.

Globally the COVID-19 pandemic has altered academic practices significantly. A nationwide online education had been in effect in Bangladesh since March 2020 due to the closing down of schools for an indefinite period. While several studies have explored the effects of such a sudden shift in the learning environment for the older students, the prima...

In this commentary, I refer to the issue of typological differences and how they impact the acquisition data by discussing findings from Bangla. Previous and ongoing studies of the acquisition of Bangla reveal that several claims regarding children's linguistic trajectory, emerging from some of the well-studied languages, are not confirmed. I also...

In this commentary, I refer to the issue of typological differences and how they impact the acquisition data by discussing findings from Bangla. Previous and ongoing studies of the acquisition of Bangla reveal that several claims regarding children’s linguistic trajectory, emerging from some of the well-studied languages, are not confirmed. I also...

Translanguaging in speech is a common practice among bilingual and multilingual individuals. Although aspects of translanguaging such as codeswitching have been studied often in the literature, such practices have not been commonly discussed from the perspective of the young adults who use them. The present study is based on five Bangladeshi studen...

Crosslinguistic research into language development reveals that typological features determine children’s developmental patterns to a large extent. The present study examines the early morphological development in the verb inflectional paradigm in Bangla. Data from the first 6 months since the emergence of two-word combinations were collected from...

Background A comprehensive aphasia assessment is necessary to diagnose the type and severity of aphasia differentially and guide appropriate interventions. One component of an aphasia assessment is the picture description task (PDT), designed to probe spontaneous speech fluency and information content. Most aphasia assessments use black‐and‐white l...

The study examines the nature of productivity within the verbal paradigm among typically-developing Bangla-speaking pre-school children. Spontaneous language samples of 30 typically-developing children aged 2 to 4 were collected. Productivity of the verb stems and inflections were calculated based on a specific criterion. The results revealed tha...

This exploratory study investigates the possibility of Online Language Teacher Education (OLTE) in Bangladesh for the secondary level English teachers' ongoing development. Due to infrastructural limitations such as inadequate number of trainers, availability of training programmes, distance to the training centre, face-to-face trainings are often...

Background Children with language disorder across languages have problems with verb morphology. The nature of these problems varies according to the typology of the language. The language analyzed in this paper is the Standard Bangla spoken in Dhaka, Bangladesh, by more than 200 million people. It is an underexplored language with agglutinative fea...

The study attempts to find out the preferences of students for different feedback strategies in writing, their views about the implementation and usefulness of the existing feedback practice, and their problems and expectations from it. Feedback in writing is a vital act for its development where the perception of the students is important. It is h...

The paper presents a description of the Colloquial Bangla (Bengali) verb morphology in relation to the Standard Bangla. As researchers begin to conduct studies in various aspects of Bangla, e.g. in computational linguistics or child language acquisition, descriptions of colloquial Bangla are required. An important area of enquiry is the verb inflec...

Verb inflections have often been found to be challenging for children to acquire. This paper explores the methodological specifications for eliciting a set of inflected forms in Bangla morphology that is of interest for examining children’s morphosyntactic development, based on a pilot study conducted with 20 monolingual Bangla-speaking children be...

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific develop...

Morphosyntactic Development of Bangla-Speaking Children with Language Impairment

A Description of Verb Morphology in Standard and Colloquial Bangla (accepted but did not participate)

Aims: Verb morphology, arguably, is identified as an area of exceptional challenge for the language development of both young typically-developing children, and children with language difficulties (Leonard, 2014a; Rice & Wexler, 2001). The developmental patterns of verb acquisition are found to be strongly governed by the typological properties of...

Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking pre-school children

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a language disorder that primarily affects oral language selectively. This impairment is not any sudden loss; rather some children are born with this disability. The impaired children exhibit this disorder by producing unusually faulty language, which the other children of their age have outgrown. Children with...

Like in any other learning situation, in a second language classroom a learner essentially needs to be provided with feedback on his/her performance. Due to the emergence of Communicative Language Teaching and Learner-centered Teaching, students’ active participation in language learning is now highly sought and therefore, peer correction is becomi...