This article highlights how a community-organized language school that teaches Persian serves as a site of diasporic cultural production. Specifically, I examine how the school serves as a site to teach the Persian language, delimit cultural meanings, and facilitate a sense of belonging and community membership among a diverse group of parents and…

Many immigrant children might face challenges in maintaining their heritage languages--that is, continuing using their first languages (L1s) or the L1s of their parents. Factors such as pressure from schools and the desire to assimilate into the mainstream society might lead these children to learn a dominant language at the cost of losing their…

This article emerges from an ongoing exploration into how British minority ethnic communities in the London area create spaces in community-based programs to maintain or develop their languages and literacies. In London, more than one-third of the 850,000 school children speak a language other than English at home (Baker & Eversley, 2000). This…

As we search for a new paradigm in post-apartheid South Africa, the knowledge base and worldview of the KhoeSan first Indigenous peoples is largely missing. The South African government has established various mechanisms as agents for social change. Institutions of higher learning have implemented transformation programs. KhoeSan peoples, however,…

This article focuses on the 3 San communities in South Africa: the !Xun, the Khwe, and the [image omitted]Khomani San. The !Xun and Khwe communities are living in Platfontein, near Kimberley in the Northern Cape. The [image omitted]Khomani San community is living in Upington and in the southern Kalahari, which are also in the Northern Cape. This…

The extinction of language and culture in Canadian Aboriginal communities is closely linked to the historical experiences of families under past assimilation policies. Families must recover the language and culture to ward off the possibility of extinction. The revival of culture and languages, in effort not to lose our identity as First Nation…

The study focused on immigrant parents' discourses about strategies for their children's preschool bilingual development and education. The article investigated how immigrant parents described and explained these strategies. The study was based on semi-structured interviews with 4 families. The 8 parents were Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel…

Environmental refugees are increasing worldwide. Consequently, a theoretical framework is necessary for conceptualizing them in education. This article breaks new ground by providing such a framework in education, in general, and bilingual-bicultural education, in particular. The framework is grounded in O'Sullivan's (1999, 2002) transformative…

This article outlines innovative strategies, methods, and techniques for the documentation and revitalization of "Zhuang" language and culture through linguistic fieldwork. Zhuang, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in the rural areas of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of southwestern China, is the largest minority language in China, with…

This article presents an in-depth, small-scale qualitative study of a Hebrew-Russian bilingual family with 8 children, and compares the parents' perspective on the family language policy with their children's evaluation of it. Spolsky's (2004, 2009) model of language policy enables tracing the development of the parents' language "ideology" and…

This study examines the multilingual and multiliteracy practices of a group of Tibetan female youths from South Asia (India, Bhutan, Nepal) newly arrived in Toronto, Canada (N = 24). The main data are derived from a questionnaire surveying their language practices across contexts indicating the roles of education, community, and society in…